Where did you serve and what did you do?

Active duty from 1969 – 1971. Served as an infantry training officer in the US and a platoon leader and XO of a rifle company in the 2nd Infantry Division in Korea. Unit deployed for eight months of hostile fire duty along and in the DMZ. Contending with exposure to Agent Orange.

How are you Still Serving?

Six years ago I founded an Alumni Veterans Committee as part of the Alumni Association of Salesianum High School in Wilmington, DE, from which I am an alumnus. Our purpose was to acknowledge and honor living and deceased alumni vets, all the way back to World War I (school was founded in 1903). We now have 280 living alumni vets on our mailing list. I write to them quarterly. We stage two events each year to honor them. We created our own website – salesianumveterans.org. We created a 14 minute PowerPoint presentation (can be viewed on the website) skimming 100 years of service and sacrifice by our alumni vets. Two years ago we started a Veterans Scholarship Fund in the school endowment which now totals about $200,000. Our first partial scholarship awardee (the son of two Air force vets) is in his freshman year. We hope to offer two scholarships next year and three the following. We are consulting on a new outdoor memorial dedicated to our alumni vets and public servants.

Why do you do it?

I started this committee after understanding the story of one of our alumni vets – JJ Connell. JJ graduated from Salesianum in 1957. After graduating from the Naval Academy, he became a carrier-based, fighter pilot. He was shot down over North Vietnam and held as a prisoner for about six years, until he succumbed from his treatment. It made me wonder about all the alumni vets whose stories were yet to be told and how they could be honored.