I came into this thread to mention Hitler. He saw battle in WW1 as an enlisted man.
Abraham Lincoln’s military service is a bit of an oddity. He served as an officer but ended his service as an enlisted man. He served in the volunteer militia in the Black Hawk War. He enlisted, was elected captain, was mustered out, and then reenlisted as a private.
Vice-President Mondale parlayed his stint as a Corporal into a GI-Bill-funded education at law school, the better to serve as Ambassador and Senator and run for President.
Lincoln was once marching his squad of men and they came to a narrow gate. He couldn’t remember the drill command to get a large number of men to go through the gate single-file.
So he just called out: “Company will break ranks and re-assemble on the other side of that gate.”
Bobby Kennedy was a Navy Enlisted man for about 20 minutes in 1946.
Dan Quayle was a Sergeant in the National Guard.
Mo Udall went from serving as a military officer to taking over the Congressional seat vacated by his big brother Stewart Udall – who’d been an enlisted man playing gunner on an Army Air Corps B-24 during WWII, and who aforementionedly left the House of Representatives to work as a Cabinet Secretary under JFK and LBJ.
USN Petty Officer 2nd Class Cecil D. Andrus got work at a sawmill after hanging up his uniform, and eventually started serving as a State Senator before getting elected Governor, and after roughly six years of that spent roughly four years serving in the Presidential Cabinet of former naval lieutenant turned State Senator turned Governor Jimmy Carter – after which Andrus returned home and spent roughly eight more years as Governor, because of course he did.
William Usery, Jr left behind his civilian life as a welder to enlist in the Navy during WWII, serving as – well, a welder, of course. And then the war ended, and he returned to civilian life: earning paychecks as a welder, and working his way up the AFL-CIO ranks and et cetera until he eventually got tapped as Secretary of Labor.
So was Mussolini.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Served in the Austrian Army for a year In 1965
And his colleague contemporary, Ghana’s president from 1981-2001, was Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings. Does West Africa have a dearth of senior officers?
Where a lot of the senior commissioned billets are filled through patronage, nepotism and corruption, a junior go-getter or a well-experienced senior NCO who can rally those who actually do the fighting can go far.
Peter J. Brennan was a Chief Petty Officer during WWII, and decades later would tell you he (a) rallied the hardhats to counter-protest against those longhairs whining about what happened at Kent State, and (b) suddenly became a Cabinet Secretary rubbing shoulders with Nixon, and just kept at it when Nixon stepped down and Ford stepped in…