LORI DUFF / Monitor staff Petty Officer 3rd class Alba Andino, a native of Guatemala, is congratulated by friends and family after her swearing in as a citizen in Concord on Friday.

Three years ago, Petty Officer 3rd Class Alba Andino became a member of the U.S. Navy Reserves. Two years ago, she volunteered for active duty. A few months ago, with the possibility of an overseas deployment looming, the Nashua resident decided to take her patriotism a step further: She applied to become a citizen of the country she had sworn to serve and protect.

Yesterday, Andino, who came to the United States from Guatemala nearly three decades ago, joined natives of 41 other countries in a naturalization ceremony at the federal district courthouse in Concord.

"This is a great moment for me, a great pride and joy," Simon Abi Nader, the supervisor for the Manchester office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and himself a naturalized citizen from Lebanon, said before Andino led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance, "that will express to you, our new citizens, how valuable we hold the military in this country."

Andino's journey to citizenship started when she was a child, she said. Her father left to come to the United States when she was 4 years old, and her mother left to come here when she was 7.

"They worked to get us our resident alien cards," she said.

While they waited to follow her parents, Andino and her siblings lived with their grandparents, she said. It was her grandfather who got her interested in the armed forces; he had served in Guatemala's air force.

"I always wanted to be in the military,"she said.

But she had her first daughter at a young age and felt it would be unfair to enlist when her kids were small. She moved from Chicago to Puerto Rico and then to the Bronx, N.Y., for a brief time before settling in Nashua 16 years ago.

In 2000, Andino earned three associate's degrees from New Hampshire Community Technical College in Nashua - one in information systems, one in computer science and one in general studies. She worked for a company that made media servers for cable television, but she was laid off after two years.

She started thinking about the military again, but she worried about who would take care of her kids if she had to leave town; her husband died 10 years ago. Then

her daughter Betzaida, now 23, told her that she would look after her son Natanael, 18, and daughter Isa, 16, if Andino were deployed.

Andino enlisted in late February 2003, at the age of 36, as the war with Iraq was becoming an inevitability. Her timing was deliberate.

"I said, 'Well, if they need to send people to Iraq, I want to go,'"she said. "I had read in the newspapers about the suffering of the people in Iraq."

Andino's status as legal immigrant qualified her to apply for the military; she chose the Navy Reserve partially because her brother was a member. After a year, she volunteered for active duty to serve in funeral support. She works out of the Navy Operational Support Center in Manchester, representing the military at funerals of veterans.

"This is the last honor they're going to receive, it's their last farewell, so to me, that's very important," she said. "It's very emotional every time."

She had been thinking about getting her citizenship for a few years, but it was the military, which Andino said is encouraging its noncitizen personnel to become naturalized, that inspired her to finally go through the process. One of her commanding officers served as her sponsor, and many of the sailors she works with, as well as members of the Londonderry-based Company B of the Marine Corps, were on hand to see her take her oath of allegiance yesterday. After the ceremony, they presented her with an American flag that had flown atop the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

"Every American citizen should attend one of these," said Capt. Matt Dilullo, the commanding officer of the Marine group, who had never seen a naturalization ceremony before. "I realize how much I take for granted."

While Andino was the only service member taking the oath yesterday, she is not alone, said Shawn Saucier, a public information officer for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. With the help of recent legislation that makes the naturalization process quicker for soldiers, in the U.S. government's 2005 fiscal year, 6,106 military personnel became citizens. One thousand and six of those certifications were performed overseas, sometimes in installations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The possibility of a deployment to either place, as well as other overseas destinations, is a daily reality for Andino and her children.

"I was sad thinking about how she is going to go away on a ship for a year, but I guess it's all right," Isa said.

In the meanwhile, Andino keeping busy. She is earning a bachelor's degree in information systems from Daniel Webster College. She is proud to say that Natanael has decided to join the Navy, too. And at the end of next month, she will board the U.S.S. San Antonio to take her first naval cruise, from Norfolk, Va., to New York City, to participate in Fleet Week.

"I'm excited," she said. "I've been looking forward to being on a ship since I enlisted."

During the voyage and whenever she serves on a ship, Andino will be working in culinary services, which means she'll be in the kitchen, preparing food for the crew. She has never cooked for a crowd so large before, and she says she is glad that, because of her rank, she will have a lot of other officers telling her what to do.

Her children don't think there will be much of a problem, though. Their mom, they said, is a good cook.