The Annoyed Man wrote:
Interesting... In my particular case, I was born in a private French hospital in Casablanca, Morocco. My father was a native born American citizen (born in Bismarck, North Dakota), and my mother was French. However, at that time (and I assume it continues today), treaties existed between the U.S. and France which permitted dual citizenship. Therefore, even though I was born with French citizenship by virtue of both having a French mother and being born in what was at the time French territory, I am also a natural born U.S. citizen.
In fact according to one treaty between France and the U.S., military service for either[i/] nation by a dual citizen would fulfill any military obligations for both nations. At the time I was of military service age, we still had a draft (my lottery number was 339 in 1970), and France had mandatory military service for all 18 year olds. I was never drafted nor did I serve in any branch of the U.S. military. At the time, that meant that I was required to serve in the French army - although I didn't know it at the time. I've lived almost my entire life in the U.S.; consider myself an American; and speak with bit of a southern drawl. In the 1980s, one of my two younger brothers and I learned that we had been tried in absentia in France for draft evasion, and sentenced to prison. It required filling out a bunch of paperwork for the French Consul in Los Angeles to get rid of the problem. In true French fashion, rather than admit that they had made a mistake, they simply changed their paperwork to show that we had been drafted, and then released. So somewhere in a French archive, there exists a record of my military service in the French army, even though I have no recollection of it.
Go figure... It's a French thing...
Anyway, the bottom line is that I was, indeed, born on foreign soil, in a foreign hospital, of an American father and French mother, and I am still a natural born citizen. But like I said earlier... you don't want me for president anyway.
You might actually have some medals you don't know about.
