Veterans’ Day 2021

By H. David Pendleton

Lenexa, KS



These are the prepared remarks I made when I was the featured speaker at the Washburn University’s Veterans’ Day event in 2021 that honored all veterans, but specifically those veterans of the Vietnam War. My actual comments may have been slightly different.

Thanks for that introduction. I also  want to thank Chris Bowers and the Vietnam Memorial Committee of Washburn University for allowing me to speak today. I am not much into public speaking and may even have a slight phobia of doing so. I am speaking here today because I wish to honor our Veterans and for them, I will attempt to overcome that fear.

Today is Veterans Day, but it has not always been called that. In November 1919, President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day to honor those who sacrificed much to fight in the “War to End all Wars.” We now call it World War One. In 1926, Congress recognized the end of World War I with a concurrent resolution to make November 11 a national holiday renamed as Armistice Day. In 1954, many veteran organizations urged Congress to change the holiday to honor all veterans, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Kansan at heart, made the change official with a stroke of his pen and Armistice Day was now officially called, “Veterans’ Day.”

Veterans’ Day has been one of my favorite holidays and one of my earliest memories. I grew up in a small town in Southeast Kansas called Caney. If you get on Highway 75 here in Topeka and drive south until you can spit into Oklahoma, you will be standing in my hometown. Caney had a population of about 3,000 people when I was born—a far cry from its boom years of a century ago when it contained over 5,000. It is a bedroom community where many adults work in Coffeyville or Independence, Kansas or even Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Caney is not famous for much, but it’s one claim to fame is that it was the home of the national president of the Future Farmers of America in 19731974, Mark Mayfield. I probably should have tested this speech out on Mark since he makes his living as a public speaker.

When I was young, Caney always had a Veterans’ Day parade and the town would swell to twice its normal population. A big parade would come down Fourth Avenue—that’s the main street in the town—with more than a dozen local bands from the area participating. There were floats and groups of veterans, mostly men, representing the various conflicts they had served in since World War One. There sometimes would be a carnival and the Page Milk Company in Coffeyville would sent over its converted fire truck to give rides to the kids.

The activities were great, but the reason I enjoyed the holiday was it was one of the two times of the year that my paternal grandfather from Denver, Colorado would come to visit. He and his wife enjoyed traveling and always took slides of his latest visit to Ireland, London, or some other exotic place. While his slide show bored most of my family, I enjoyed his beautiful photographs and dreamed about visiting the places my grandfather traveled.

Later, I found out that my grandfather had learned to be a photographer while serving in the United States Army. In 1942, my paternal grandfather was drafted into the Army at the age of 44. The maximum draft age for the Selective Service to call someone into the Army for World War Two was 45 years of age. The Selective Service would not give him a deferral because he was divorced, his lone child was over 21 years of age, and selling insurance was not considered essential wartime work. After training at Lowery Field in Denver, my grandfather spent three years as an Aerial Reconnaissance Photographer in the China-Burma-India theater for the Army Air Force. He was not the first Pendleton to serve in the military.

I come from a long line of Pendletons that have served in the military. My paternal twelfth grandfather, Brian Pendleton, was residing in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by 1628. That’s almost 400 years ago. He was primarily a surveyor and businessman but he also served as a Major in the Massachusetts militia. The Army National Guard traces its history back to these first Massachusetts militia units. On my direct line between Brian and me are a father and son who both served as Revolutionary War officers.

This is not the only time a Pendleton father and son served in the same war together. I told you about my grandfather but his son—my father—also served in World War Two. My father enlisted in the Missouri Army National Guard in 1937 at the age of 17 and graduated from college in May 1941. When his Guard unit was mobilized in December 1941, my father received a medical discharge due to his poor eyesight. By March 1942, either my dad’s eyesight had improved or the Army was more desperate for Soldiers as he was now back on active duty. The Army would not send him overseas due to his eyesight, however, but they trained him to become a radar operator in Kansas City and Arkansas before sending him to a radar station in Florida. My father spent almost three years manning a radar facility on Miami Beach during World War Two. My father, however, served in the military from 1937 to 1973 in the Active Army, Air National Guard, Army National Guard, or the Army Reserve before retiring as a Master Sergeant.

While my father never actively encouraged his children to join the military, he never discouraged us either.  Eventually, four of his five children served in the Army. Two were enlisted with one primarily on active duty and one in the National Guard. Two of us our retired officers—one from active duty and one from the Army Reserve.

I went to the University of Kansas on an Army ROTC scholarship and received my commission in 1981. I served over twenty-three years in uniform starting in the Infantry and ending up in Civil Affairs. My undergraduate degree is in European history with a focus on Germany between 1871 and 1945. I also have a Masters in Military History where my emphasis was on World War One.

I was originally a World War Two European Theater historian. In February 2007 I began volunteering at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri. It was then I switched my focus of study to the First World War and earned that masters’ degree.

You are probably asking yourself, “When is this blowhard going to get to Vietnam?” Let’s go there right now. The time is late January 1968. I am only eight years old and trying to learn how to write cursive in the third grade. On the other side of the world, the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong guerillas launch the Tet Offensive on January 30th. This event would change my life.

At that time, my father was the First Sergeant of the 1011th Supply and Service Company—a reserve unit based in Independence, Kansas. In early May 1968, the 1011th was federalized and sent for additional training at Fort Benning, Georgia before the unit would deploy overseas. My older brother was a high school senior. My father reported with his unit to Fort Benning and did not get to see my brother graduate from high school.

The 1011th deployed to Vietnam, but my father did not go with them for medical reasons. Instead, the Army kept him at Fort Benning for about nineteen months. A year and a half is a long time in the life of a nine-year-old kid. I saw my father once in that nineteen months and never talked to him as we could not afford to waste money with me talking to him long distance.

The Vietnam War affected our family in other ways as my brother was still draft eligible. Instead, he took Army ROTC at the Coffeyville Community Junior College and then earned a two-year Army ROTC scholarship to attend Pittsburg State College. My brother was on schedule to graduate in May 1972 and receive his commission. Late in his junior year, he suffered the first of two severe injuries. First, he was hit by a car while crossing a street on campus and suffered a broken leg. Just after he recovered from that injury, he broke his other leg while doing military training. The leg did not respond to medical treatment so he was disqualified from the Army ROTC program. Without the scholarship, my brother was forced to drop out of college one semester short of his degree.

A few years ago, I found a list of the 627 service members of those with a Kansas Home of Record who died in the Vietnam War. I am a numbers person so I wanted to see where they were all from so I put them information into a spreadsheet based on their home town and then on a map of Kansas by country. I did not know what I was going to do with the information at the time. I just thought it was fascinating that one-sixth of those that died were from Sedgwick County. That makes sense since Wichita is our state’s largest city. Forty-one of them were from here in Shawnee County. Almost every county in Kansas—all 105 of them—lost at least one service member in Vietnam.

In early April of this year, I ran across my old spreadsheet and this was about eight weeks before Memorial Day. I asked myself what I could do to honor those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation in Vietnam. The answer to my own question was that I would try to do a mini-biography on each person that made the ultimate sacrifice and post it on a Facebook page called “Kansas History Geeks” because their lives are Kansas history.

By look at several websites, I was able to piece together the basic information of each member’s service, especially during Vietnam. For some individuals, I found many pictures and more information about them. I tried to weave any information I found on each hero into a short story that would give the readers a sense of the individual—both in the military and even before they served. A few relatives of these fallen heroes have reached out to me and provided additional photographs and information. After posting on Facebook, some other family members contacted me to thank me. I want to make it clear that I was not seeking any recognition but just wanted to provide our fellow Kansans a little snapshot of the heroes that lived among us.

My project has helped me learn even more about the Vietnam War than I already knew. I have taken a couple of history classes on the Vietnam War but they were long ago and were mainly at the strategic level. History is different from each individual combatant’s perspective and most of what is written about war is superficial. My research has shown that all 627 Kansans killed in Vietnam were heroes in some way. Hundreds of selfless acts of courage took place daily in Vietnam. Each service member knew that each day they woke up, they were one day closer to coming home. Instead of trying to protect themselves from harm, time and time again these heroes went out of the way to help their buddies who were in danger.

The remains of forty-one of the 627 Kansans killed in Vietnam have still not been located, repatriated, or identified. There are approximately 63,000 Vietnam Veterans that currently reside in Kansas. That is 2,181 Vietnam Veterans for each 100,000 Kansans. Oscar Hammerstein wrote in the musical, Carousel, “As long as there’s one person on earth who remembers you, it isn’t over.” Let’s make sure that we remember the Vietnam Veterans that served so it is never over for them.

But this day is not only for us to honor those that served in Vietnam but Veterans’ Day is for anyone that has ever served. This could be a service member from World War Two, Korea, Panama, Grenada, Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, or all the other campaigns that have taken place over the years and includes those service members that never left the United States or served in a combat zone.

Any veteran is in an elite group. There are currently around nineteen million veterans or less than ten percent of the American adult population. Each year, the percent of Americans that choose to serve becomes proportionally less. A simple analogy is the sheep, the wolf, and the sheep dog. Those of us that serve in the military are the sheep dogs who protect the flock from the wolves. Sheep dogs are willing to die to protect their flock. We can always use more sheep dogs.

Thomas Paine, the American Revolutionary, said “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.” While we may wish that his statement is no longer true or possibly needed, we all must remain vigilant to any person or group that promises us security in return for the sacrifices of our freedoms. Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” Let us all remain vigilant against all encroachments on our freedoms.

On this day, we annually recognize those that have stood the watch to protect our freedoms, but especially those who served in Vietnam. Thank you for your time today and may God continue to bless Kansas and the United States of America.