Everett's Military Support by John C. Zielinski

Retrieving Lansing (MI) Everett High School’s Vietnam War

by John Christopher Zielinski

Everett Social Studies Teacher

INTRODUCTION

Lansing Everett High School has a powerful tradition of service and sacrifice supporting the United States of America. Since the Second World War countless numbers of Everett individuals have served in the military, while many of them have fought during times of war. That most especially includes many recent graduates whom have served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Twenty-four Everett alumni have been killed during this time period while serving in our military. Twenty-three of these names are listed on our school memorial plaque. Twelve of these men are honored for their sacrifices through the inscription of their names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. These names are listed in the appendix of this story. This places Everett High School and the Southside Lansing community in a special aura regarding sacrifices made during the Vietnam War. Everett is among a pantheon of schools to have suffered so grievously during a conflict many Americans did not support and which many more tried to forget after the fighting.

However, Everett could not forget and would not be allowed to forget about its history. In the Fall,1971 a roughly 150 pound Memorial was placed on the wall just inside the main entrance of the school. Under a chiseled bronze eagle the following is inscribed: In Memory Of Our Fellow Students Who Died Defending America’s Eternal Freedoms. Underneath, listed on individual plates are the names of twenty-three good Americans from Everett High School, whom performed their ultimate sacrifices; including the Vietnam veterans. The twenty-fourth Everett graduate to have died while on active duty status perished in 2007. His name is Randy Reid, and he died of a congenital heart condition while at basic training, at the age of nineteen.

Every Memorial Day Ceremony, I have 24 Everett students read off their names, one at a time. This is the Roll Call of Everett’s Fallen Warriors. This is where we usually get emotional during the programs. I got this idea long ago from the movie “TAPS.” At the beginning of that movie, George C. Scott reads off the fictitious names of alumni from the fictitious Bunker Hill Academy whom were killed in our wars.

Paul Powers was a lifelong Everett individual. He went to Everett as a student back in the 1940s when it was a K-12 school. He was an excellent student and an all-state athlete. He served in the US Army and was a Korean War veteran. After completing college, he returned to Everett as a teacher and coach. After his death in 1987 from cancer, he became an Everett legend, and a memorial was dedicated at Everett to him. It is still located just outside the main office. He was inducted posthumously into the Everett High School Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame in 2004.

Powers is the teacher whom created this Memorial, and collected the list of names to be so honored. Nothing ever gets done in a school unless a teacher makes it happen. It is likely that he knew most of these men personally, from one point or another in his life, including his nephew Stephen James Powers, killed in Vietnam.

David Bruce Miller was killed right before Independence Day, 1970. In the early part of 1971, the last two Everett graduates to die in Vietnam (Charles E. Bovinette, Jr. and William Harold Hjorth), perished. This was particularly difficult for Powers because Everett had already paid its fair share to America. After dealing with such tragedies throughout most of the 1960s, the people of southside Lansing (Everett) must have thought they were through enduring these ultimate sacrifices. It may have been a new decade, but it was the same old, nasty war. Besides the 12 men on the Wall, Everett also lost two graduates whom were in the military at this time, but died not in Vietnam. Furthermore, this war was supposed to be winding down. We were no longer even fighting under the pretense of defending independence and freedom for the Southeast Asians. America was about to abandon our allies, and we were fighting onward for the most honorable way out of this quagmire.

The pain from the wounds left by previous deaths felt by the people of this community because of the Vietnam War were split open three more times in less then one year. These deaths were totally attributable to the leaders of our national government. Everett, as had become customary, paid the price for this arrogance of power by our national leadership.

This was the final motivation for Powers to put his ideas into practice, by listing the individual names of Everett’s Fallen Warriors onto a Memorial. This was eleven years before the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC on 11 November 1982.

This article is juxtaposed into two main parts. First, we will remember not just the spirit of these twelve fallen warriors, but also take into account the memories of other Everett Vietnam veterans. Some of them are still with us, pushing into their sixties but with fresh perspectives which are still valuable today. Some died subsequently of their war wounds or through the aging process, speeded along by their exposures during the war. Some took their own lives. Second, we will describe the memorials and remembrances at Everett High School dedicated to all of these men the past sixteen years while I have been the teacher in charge of the Everett Memorial Day Committee. It has been my honor to stand on the shoulders of Paul Powers for my project. He did all the initial heavy work, and I carried on the traditions.

SECTION TWO

Forty-four men whom listed Lansing, Michigan as their homes of record upon entering military service perished in the Vietnam War. While they each faced eternity individually, fate has connected them through this common destiny. Let us not forget that these military funerals were happening all over this city, effecting persons from other Lansing high schools, also. These men continue bringing us together even forty four years later.

Through my research, I know that Peter Brum and Jose Salazar are graduates of Lansing Eastern High School, and Clarence Heckman is a graduate of Lansing Sexton High School. Brum and Salazar are both buried at Evergreen Cemetery and Heckman is buried at St. Josephs Cemetery, both of Lansing.

James Harry McClain was the first Everett graduate killed in Vietnam. He is on the “1959” panel (East 1). Having perished in the Summer, 1964, he was one of the first Americans to die in a war before it was even a war. His death just predates the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, where Congress disavowed some of its responsibilities by giving President Lyndon B. Johnson the power to take all “necessary and proper measures” to wage undeclared war. By early 1965, the continuation of war was totally due to decisions made by a small number of men associated to Johnson. Some were government leaders left over from the “can-do” Kennedy Administration, and the others were military generals itching for war. This small group of Americans sold all the rest of us out through their faulty decision-making processes.

McClain was a helicopter pilot. Everett legend states that his remains just barely fit into a small pouch. I met one of his relatives at a “Traveling Wall” at the VFW Home for Children in Eaton Rapids in August, 2007. I cannot remember that person’s name; but he reaffirmed that legend was factual. James’ birthday was 11 September long before that date earned its significance. He is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in central Lansing.

That four day weekend in August, 2007 was very special to me. I volunteered sixteen hours as a “Wall Guide.” I helped people find their loved ones or old friends on the Wall, made them a tracing of that name, and then left them to their thoughts. I also enjoyed giving history lessons about the Wall when people sought information from me, and sometimes when people did not seek information from me.

For instance, I often brought people to panel 3E. It is centrally located near the apex of the Memorial, and men from two famous early war battles are remembered on it. The 48 men killed on 8 November 1965 from the 173d Airborne Brigade in War Zone D, memorialized by the song “8th of November,” by John Rich and Big Kenny, are here. Their company was ambushed by roughly 1200 Viet Cong. Lawrence Joel was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery that day. He was the first living African-American serviceman so honored since the Spanish-American War. Niles Harris was one of the men saved by Joel, and he inspired Big & Rich with his story. Every year, he drinks a toast on that date to his friends. These men made an incredible video of their trip back to Hill 65, so Harris could leave behind his jungle boots near the sight where he was wounded. They also met the former enemy soldier whom informed the VC that they were coming. The background of the jungle and the “brown water” pathways they took to get there are incredible. I always show this video to my students.

This panel also contains the nearly 150 names of men killed on LZ X-Ray and LZ Albany, during the Battle of Ia Drang Valley, from later that month. Roughly 400 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Infantry (George A. Custer’s unit at the Little Bighorn), were ambushed by nearly 1500 North Vietnamese at X-Ray. I always focus on Henry Herrick. He was one of the first men killed at X-Ray, and he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. This was the battle portrayed in the movie “We Were Soldiers.” A couple days later, men of the 2d Battalion, whom relieved this unit, were themselves ambushed a few miles away near Albany. This battle is memorialized perfectly in the ABC News video “Ambush! The Battle of Ia Drang.” Jack Smith (son of Harry K.), whom was in this battle, was the journalist. General William Westmoreland ate Thanksgiving dinner with the survivors of this battle one week later.

I made note of two names that many people came to visit that weekend. Elgie Hanna was the only former resident of the VFW Home for Children to die in Vietnam. There is a road named for him that runs past his old home. He is on panel 45E, and is buried at Rosehill Cemetery in Eaton Rapids. The other person was Glenn Fetterman. He was a helicopter pilot from Charlotte, Michigan. He is on panel 28W, and is buried in Maple Hill Cemetery in Charlotte. Everybody loved these two men

In the late 1990s, when I first started inquiring about the origins of the Everett Memorial, the only person whom remembered anything about it was Ken Willison. He was retired, but he was the former head custodian at Everett in 1971. He confirmed the date that the plaque was dedicated, and that Paul Powers was responsible for it. When the two of them attached the 23 nameplates to it, there was no chronological ordering to them; they were all juxtaposed. They did all of this work themselves, and apparently there was no ceremony.

In the early part of the millennium, Robert Wing-Proctor, an Everett custodian, and himself a Vietnam veteran whom was about to retire from the Michigan National Guard,
removed the nameplates and took down the Memorial. He degreased the plaque from about 30 years of crud, and then we put the names back, but in more of a chronological order.

The first three nameplates we put back on were men we knew for sure died in World War II. We had pictures of them that they had sent to Everett. It apparently was a tradition that men and women whom served during that war sent pictures of themselves in uniform to their old high schools. Everett has two huge files of pictures from our World War Two veterans that have survived for about seventy years. We are currently in the process of scanning these pictures to computer files, and will probably seek even more such pictures of World War II Everett alumni from our community. The next six names are men we assume are from the Second World War, the Korean War and the Cold War period. We are currently verifying the status of these six Everett graduates. All we know is that if Powers put their names on the Everett Memorial, they belonged there. We have been utilizing the recently released 1940 Census data while trying to place these six men.

I came across a letter dated 20 September 1944, which was sent from the local American Legion Maurice Harvey Dixon Post No. 12 to the old Everett High School. It concerned two of the men on our Memorial. Everett administrative assistant, Nita Kennedy, brought the letter to my attention. Jack Louis Turner was killed in action on 11 June 1944 and Donald W. Muir was killed in action on 20 June 1944. It is hard to think about how these two deaths, so close together, must have affected Everett; even in a time when so many Americans were dying for our country. The letter did not give specifics about the circumstances of their deaths. However, from the picture we have of Muir, he was wearing his gold pilot wings on his uniform. God only knows what his final moments must have been like.

My second epiphany about the Everett Memorial also occurred in the late 1990s. Bruce Whipple is an Everett graduate and a Vietnam veteran. He was assigned to FSB Ripcord. He rotated back to the states (DEROS), ten days before that base was overrun on 23 July 1970. His hooch was right beneath the helicopter landing pad. His commander, Andre Lucas, was killed on that pad, and was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Bruce knew many of the roughly 71 men whom died that day.

He is a lifelong resident of South Lansing and his three sons are also Everett graduates. He brought me a computer list from the old website 2649, which contained all persons on the Wall whom listed Michigan as their state of record upon entering the military. This was during the fundraising phase for what would become the Michigan Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated in downtown Lansing on Veterans Day, 2002. The Michigan memorial lists the counties of Michigan in alphabetical order on a number of panels. The men and I believe two women from Michigan listed on the Wall are contained alphabetically under their home counties. Wayne County (Detroit) takes up almost two of these panels.

I was able to locate a discrepancy for two men whom are misplaced on the Michigan Vietnam Veterans Memorial, because their hometown is incorrectly labeled on the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Dale Lee Funk and David Bruce Nelson were from Comstock Park, within Kent County. Unfortunately, the computer has them from Comstock, Michigan, within Kalamazoo County. I know this because I am from their hometown. The 1970 Comstock Park High School yearbook was dedicated in their honor by Skaidrite Poga, my former teacher. Poga and Paul Powers seem to be among the very few people whom memorialized our war dead from Vietnam way back then; before it was the popular thing to do.

Although their homes of record can be fixed on the national website, and it will not effect their locations on the national memorial, the same cannot be said for the state memorial. They are listed with the other brave men from Kalamazoo County, and it does not appear that their names can be transferred to Kent County.

The list Whipple brought me was for Ingham County. I still have that paperwork in my program files. Seventy men on the two Memorials (D.C. & Lansing) listed their homes of record from within Ingham County. Sitting at the desk in my classroom, I easily recognized many of the names from this list from “my” Memorial at Everett. I had been walking by that plaque everyday for many years. Also, I had heard their names being read all those years by students during our “roll calls.” Through our diversity, we always expressed those names beautifully. We left my classroom for the plaque, and connected Everett history through those twelve men.

Whipple owns a Vietnam veterans museum. He has an entire trailer of authentic Vietnam War gear and artifacts, which he always brings to reunions and veterans gatherings. He started his collection with papers and pictures he sent home from Vietnam. His favorite artifact is a 24” x 30” photo of Ripcord, which originally was from a basic Kodak photo. He has a similar sized photo of himself and a comrade, Roy Miller posing behind an M60 machine gun from the day they attended the Bob Hope Christmas Show, 1969. His entire collection can be viewed at his website whipstour@yahoo.com.

Two Vietnam Era names were on the Everett plaque, but not on the Wall. Jeffrey A. Campbell and Randy W. Twichell died while on active military status during this time, but not in Vietnam. When we reattached the nameplates to the plaque after completing our maintenance, I put them next after the nine names from our earlier conflicts and wars. Our twelve “Wall” veterans are listed lastly on the Memorial in chronological order of their death dates.

For some reason, there were two nameplates for Scott M. Burgess, one of our Wall veterans. For thirty years, there were two nameplates on this plaque for Burgess. But there was only one man with that name, and he was a good man. On the afternoon when we replaced the nameplates, I kept the extra Burgess plate. For a couple of years, I kept it in my classroom, for personal inspiration and as a teaching aid. It was never a paper-weight.

I became aware that the local Civil Air Patrol Squadron was named in honor of Burgess. Every year, a number of mid-Michigan high school students serve as cadets in this program. Forty years earlier, Scott was a cadet in that unit while a student at Everett. I established the Civil Air Patrol within my program. Their cadets served as the Color Guard at a couple of my ceremonies. I donated that extra nameplate to them.

The official website of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is vvmf.org. When doing a name search on this fascinating website for Lansing, the user must specify Lansing, Michigan. There are ten men on the Wall from Lansing, Illinois and one man from Lansing, North Carolina; for a total of 55 men from a city of Lansing on the Wall.

The next step in my research was to put faces to these 14 Vietnam Era names. We went through all of the Everett yearbooks from the mid to late 1960s, and we found student photographs for 13 of them. We put these high school pictures together into one memorial, with their KIA dates next to their photos. This is what I am using as the cover page for this article. Yearbooks are the official historical documents for any school, and I don’t just say that because I am the current yearbook advisor at Everett. The Everett students whom worked on these yearbooks going on five decades ago did really outstanding work. We also have pictures of most of these men in their uniforms on the computer.

These were fine young men. They were scholars, athletes and club participators. Their pictures were not just in the classroom photo sections, they were pictured throughout these yearbooks. Their smiles and body languages lit up those pages, as they smiled at the future, pondering their places in this world. There they were embracing their classmates and Everett friends, filled with the piss and vinegar of youth. These men were put on this Earth, at Everett, for such great things in life; not to die in Vietnam. It is this wasted human potential that bothers me the most about that war.

At times, I had to put these yearbooks away for personal emotional reasons. Looking at these individuals from their high school years, they had the rest of their lives to live. I think of all the great things they would have achieved in life had they been allowed by our government to grow old. God did not put them here to die in Vietnam, their national leaders did that to them. I had to periodically put those yearbooks away because I knew how their life stories ended, way too soon. I thought about their parents, whom had to bury them at such young ages.

All we had left to go with these names and now the faces of our dead warriors was the fact that at Everett we have been honoring these beautiful, brave people through the memorials and ceremonies we have performed since 1996.

SECTION THREE

The Everett Memorial Day, Veterans Day and 9/11 ceremonies have always been unique. Since 1996, we have performed nearly forty assemblies under these auspices. That first Veterans Day was more of a fifteen minute gathering at the school flagpole with my class and that of my English partner, Deb Babcock. That next Veterans Day gathering at the flagpole was just as small, but this time we were covered by the local media. Through the next few years, we steadily grew, and I invited a couple more teachers to bring their classes down. Before long, there were too many students around the flagpole. By about the year 2000, my program had become a school-wide project, and our ceremonies were held usually in the Everett Auditorium, and sometimes out at the football stadium. Our stadium was named in 1985 after Archie Ross, a long-time Everett teacher and administrator. He played football in high school at the old Grand Rapids (MI) South High School as a teammate of President Gerald R. Ford. In 1974, Ford had all of his old high school teammates to the White House for Thanksgiving dinner.

I worked through Everett tradition, and slowly became aware of Everett’s military history. What made us really memorable though, was that my ceremonies were always student-oriented, both with readings and performances. I never told the students what to do nor say. I gave them a time-frame and told them not to go over it. I always utilized the Performing Arts department at my school, and we always had hundreds of Everett students and their teachers in our audience, at every showing. Those young people were always appropriate, interested and respectful of what we were doing, and whom we were honoring.

By my very rough estimate thousands of Everett students have taken part in my productions (as performers, readers and interested spectators), over the life of my program. I am sure that all of those former students are currently doing great things for our community, or for the communities where they now reside. For a few years, we even did separate ceremonies at Everett where we brought in hundreds of Lansing School District elementary students, teaching them about American heroes; through patriotism.

Nobody can ever take this away from me, no matter what happens to me in my career. However, I am most proud of the fact that I always involved members from our community in our productions. We brought them into Everett. From day one, the local VFW 701 has been involved; primarily as our color guard, but also sometimes providing me with speakers. On five different occasions, the State of Michigan VFW commander spoke at one of my functions.

For Memorial Day, 2003, I invited the mother and sister of David Bruce Miller to be our special guests. This was thirty-three years after he was killed in Vietnam. His mother went to a local church also attended by one of my students, and that is how I got her. That next year, I got the two sisters of Steven James Powers to be my special guests. They were both Everett alumni, and this was thirty-seven years after he was killed in Vietnam.

Every ceremony was magical because we never forced anything down the throats of our guests. I forbade all community participants from getting political during my programs, and I also stuck to this guideline myself. I told them to check their politics at the door, and they could pick them (it?), back up afterward. I used to keep track of the persons (many of whom were liberal, politically), who complemented me afterward about my ceremonies not being what they were expecting. All we did was speak and perform from our collective hearts, and the goose bumps on the arms of our audience members said everything about it.

During Memorial Day Weekend, 2008, a teacher from Charlotte High School, John Moran, hosted “The Wall That Heals” at his school. He allowed me to volunteer for sixteen hours that weekend as a Wall guide, just as I had done seven months earlier with another traveling Wall at the VFW Home for Children. The only major difference was that we could not make tracings over the names of this Wall, we had to fill out postcards for people to mail to the DC Monument, from where they were sent laser-etched name scrapings. I met many of the same good people as I had met seven months before. All told, I volunteered thirty two hours reacquainting people with the names of their loved ones whom died so long ago. Moran also let me bring two busloads of Everett students to his school that Friday so we could perform our Memorial Day Ceremony in front of that Wall. It was all so incredible. We honored my former student, Randy Reid, by bringing his family along as part of our ceremony. This was less then one year after his untimely death.

EPILOGUE

When I was hired at Everett High School by Dale Glynn, I came into our school with a rough idea of my program. He was my building principal, and the other part of the reason why we have been so successful. He always let me do whatever I wanted, as long as I could explain myself to his satisfaction. He gave me substitute teacher relief all the time, and bought me over three hundred medals to give to Everett students whom participated for me. All we ever wanted was to teach Everett students about our history. We are still grounded to that objective twenty years later; albeit, our appeal has grown exponentially within our community during that time.

David Schaberg was an Everett parent when I first started, and he is also an Everett graduate from 1968. When he spoke to our students about the men from Everett whom served and died in Vietnam, he spoke in the first person. He would tell our kids that he remembered walking through the hallways of Everett, and sitting in our classrooms with these people. Our students always related when we spoke like that to them.

Cleveland Henry was a counselor at Everett, and is a Korean War veteran while serving with the 82d Airborne Division. He used his brother’s records to enlist in the Army at age 15. With the war going on (and his being African American), nobody questioned his credentials for Infantry training. He was always the person whom led the actual flag presentations during our ceremonies; always proudly wearing his green beret.

Finally, I thank all of my colleagues and fellow staff at Everett for always supporting me in all of these endeavors. If not for them, this program would have died long ago due to lack of interest. The only way I could justify all of the work I did for these programs, sometimes while on my salary time, often on my own off-duty time, was that I was taking care of Everett students. The thing is that while I was teaching those young people about aspects of life for which they had little experience, they were also teaching me things about life.

APPENDIX

These names appear on the Memorial plaque: Kenneth Baumer (WWII), Andrew Clark Jr. (Unknown), Duane Gould (Probably WWII), Rolland Heintzelman (Probably WWII), James Marrs (WWII), Donald Muir (WWII), Robert Pangle (Unknown), Robert Skinner (Unknown), Jack Turner (WWII).

These names appear both on our Memorial plaque, and also on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Charles E. Bovinette Jr (’66), Scott M. Burgess (’65), Lee R. Bush (’65), Peter R. DeWilde Jr (’68), Donald A. Demond (?), Alan J. Farhat (’65), William H. Hjorth (?), James H. McClain (’52), David B. Miller (’67), Steven J. Powers (’67), Terry C. Simison (’65), Bruce A. Wagner (’63).

These two names appear on our Memorial plaque and died during the Vietnam Era: Jeffrey A. Campbell (’68) and Randy Twichell (?).

Randy Reid (’07) died during basic training; his name is not on the Memorial plaque.