Memorial Day: Remembering a fallen Scott County Marine this Memorial Day

This story has been updated.

Special Memorial Day content will be published in the Weekend Southeast Missourian and online through Sunday.

Michael Boardman, a 1966 graduate of Sikeston (Missouri) High School, had a dream of becoming a draftsman or an architect.

It was a vision of the future tragically cut short at age 19 when the Marine lance corporal was killed in action in Vietnam, nearly 55 years ago.

"(Mike) had just graduated, and he and a friend went to St. Louis and enlisted in the Marines," said his sister Brenda Winters, who lives today in Miner, Missouri, next door to Sikeston.

"On the day Mike signed up, he received his acceptance letter from Washington University, but as he'd already enlisted, college was off the table," she said.

According to the former Daily Standard newspaper, which merged into the Standard Democrat in 1989, Boardman once won a No. 1 rating in the state Industrial Education Association award contest for a set of house plans he created.

Michael Boardman of Sikeston, Missouri, is in this undated high school photograph. A Marine, Boardman was killed five weeks after arrival in Vietnam in 1967.Submitted

After his enlistment but before being shipped overseas, Boardman attended a Vietnamese language school and had understood he would serve as an interpreter.

Ultimate sacrifice

Military records show Boardman died July 19, 1967, when a vehicle in which he was riding ran over a land mine in Thua Thien province in central Vietnam, killing all occupants. Boardman was on a scouting mission at the time and had been "in country" for all of five weeks at the time of his passing.

"(His death) hit everyone really hard, and as I remember, he was the first one from this immediate area killed in Vietnam," Winters recalled. "Our father had been in the Army Air Corps during World War II and had been a prisoner of war in Germany, so Dad knew what Mike might have been looking at when he went in."

Winters said her younger brother's body was not returned to the U.S. until August.

Marine Lance Cpl. Michael Boardman, of Sikeston, Missouri, top center, is in a 1960s family photograph. Bottom row (from left) -- Boardman's sister, Brenda, and his mother, Carletta; top -- brothers Kevin, Michael and Marc. Michael Boardman was killed in action in Vietnam on June 19, 1967.Submitted

"He was interred in (Sikeston's) Garden of Memories cemetery originally, but later (Mike's) body was moved to Missouri Veterans Cemetery at Bloomfield, where our parents are buried."

Classmate recollection

Linda Stroman of Benton, Missouri, was a year behind Boardman, who played football and ran track at Sikeston High.

"The one thing I really recall was (Boardman) was an excellent swimmer and diver. It was just amazing to watch him in a pool," Stroman said, adding she remembered her late classmate as quiet, soft-spoken and humble.

Stroman's husband, Jim Stroman, now chaplain of the Marine Corps League in Cape Girardeau, got to Vietnam five months after Boardman's death and ended up seriously injured and nearly killed by shrapnel -- necessitating many surgeries.

"If you interviewed 100 Marines, then 100 soldiers and sailors, you're never going to hear the same story twice -- because everyone had a different perspective of Vietnam," Jim Stroman said, adding every year on May 16, he puts a post on Facebook to remember 13 guys in his unit who died that day in 1968 near Da Nang, Vietnam, during Operation Allen Brook.

Linda Stroman gets the last word about Boardman.

"Mike had written a letter to his girlfriend, which ended up being read on the radio after he passed. In it, (Boardman) said he was homesick and lamented the absence of friends and family, but he also said he also missed things he had taken for granted while in Vietnam -- like a cold Coca Cola," she recalled.