Washington ? When Sen. Kit Bond’s son, Sam, told him two years ago that he intended to join the Marines, the Missouri Republican took a deep breath and said “That’s great.”

This month, Sam Bond graduated from the Basic School at Quantico, Va. After more training, Iraq could loom in his future.

“Anybody who is in the service today is at risk,” Sen. Bond said. “There will be troops there for a long time.”

Now 23, Sam Bond graduated from Princeton University last year with a major in political science, and he completed the Marines’ Officer Candidates School last fall.

With Basic School behind him, his father said, Sam Bond chose to specialize in ground intelligence with training to possibly lead a scout sniper platoon.

Where his future orders will send him is unknown. But Sen. Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose report in recent weeks on the intelligence supporting the war found that most of it was wrong, said he expects that his son will be sent to Iraq.

Sam Bond was in training last week and unavailable for comment.

Carolyn Bond, his mother, said her son talked about possibly joining the military, perhaps the reserves, three years ago. It was August 2001. After the terrorist attacks of a month later, she recalled that she didn’t raise the issue with him again for nine months.

“I was afraid to bring it up, actually,” Carolyn Bond said. “The world was so scary then. He is my only child. I think any parent would be a little apprehensive.”

Still, she said she was proud of her son. She said he chose the Marines because, as an athlete in school, he was always “the consummate team player” and the corps’ sense of camaraderie and looking out for fellow Marines appealed to him.

“He’s not the kind of person who would be happy holed up in a law library for hours,” his mother said.

As for how many of the 535 members of Congress have children serving, associate Senate historian Donald Ritchie said, “I would assume it’s pretty few.”

Among the public, the total number of personnel in all five branches of the service represents 0.5 percent of the population, according to figures supplied by the U.S. Census and the Army.

Ritchie said few children of lawmakers are in the military because fewer lawmakers themselves have had military service. The peak was just after World War II when more than 70 percent of the House and Senate had served, he said.

Also back then, he said, “a relatively large number of children served as well.”

The numbers began to drop especially after the draft was abolished in the early 1970s. But before that, the Marines, in particular, always had a strong contingent among the members with military experience, Ritchie said.

The tradition, at least, remains strong. Every Nov. 10, the corps holds a reception on Capitol Hill to commemorate its founding in a Philadelphia tavern on that day in 1775.

“The Marines say that any senator who comes is an honorary Marine,” Ritchie said. “The numbers are so few.”