Veteran Corps returns to SEMO

They're older and a little grayer now. Most of them have traded the "VETS" sweat shirts and patched denim for collared shirts and khakis. They were once the students who scared the establishment, and now they've joined it.

But these guys can still throw a heck of a pig-roast party.

"There's pork cooking, some of the guys are playing the old games and singing some of the old songs. It's just a great event. A lot of these guys haven't seen each other since college and you can see they're all lumped together in groups talking," said Tom Giles, class of 1971.

Members of the SEMO Veteran Corps, a group of Southeast Missouri State University alumni who served in Vietnam, was in Cape Girardeau this weekend for a 30-year reunion. More than 100 veterans of the Vietnam era marched in Saturday's homecoming parade and were honored at Houck Stadium before kickoff. They held a pig roast Saturday night at VFW Lake on Benton Hill Road.

This was a different type of homecoming from the one they remember.

"You didn't want to tell people in public you were a Vietnam vet in those days. Those were tough times for the country with people forced to pick sides. We vets had to stay together," said Jim Mayer, class of 1968, who later returned for a graduate degree after his service.

The transition from the battlefield to the classroom wasn't easy. The veterans -- some as old as 30 -- came home to find age, attitude and bloody experience set them apart from the other fresh-faced students on campus.

"We were really scraggly looking," said Pete Nardie, class of 1972. "It wasn't hard to pick us out of a crowd."

And they didn't go in for the regular freshman rites of passage.

"All the fraternities have this pledge stuff. And when you come back and you've been shot at, you're not going to be a pledge to somebody who's 20 years old. So we had to start our own group," Nardie said.

Nardie was one of the founding members of the Veteran Corps, which became an official campus organization in 1968 with 14 members. It grew to more than 300 by 1971. The group faded away after the Vietnam War ended because there was no longer a steady stream of veterans to fill the ranks.

Nardie said he wasn't on campus long before he saw the need for some kind of Vietnam veterans organization. On his first day at Southeast, Nardie went to a cafeteria to order a bowl of chili, a hamburger and a glass of milk. The woman working behind the counter looked at his unkempt beard, long hair and disheveled outfit and decided to confiscate his student ID.

"She told me, 'We're under orders not to serve anybody who looks like you,'" he said.

With a group of fellow vets, Nardie went to speak to the university president, Dr. Mark Scully.

"He was just flabbergasted. He said, 'I never thought I'd see a vet who looked like you.' And I said, 'Get used to it. There's a lot of vets that look like me, and they're going to be coming to school here,'" Nardie said.

It was the first in a number of actions by the group to stand up for the respect and benefits they earned fighting for their country.

"Our political activity was all about benefits; we never took a stand on the war. We lobbied Congress to make sure we got money under the GI Bill and counseling for readjustment. That was our concern, looking after the vets when they came home," Mayer said.

Mayer has now turned veterans advocacy into a full-time job. He works as an outreach coordinator for the Veterans Health Administration in the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, D.C. He wants to make sure all veterans have a support system like the Veteran Corps when they return home.

"When you talk about shell shock, to me the Vets Corps was like our decompressor. These were the guys you leaned on to get normal again," he said.

And though corps members started off as outsiders, it wasn't long before they won over the university administration.

"They saw we were a little older and more experienced, so they trusted us," Mayer said.

When unrest hit Kent State in 1970, Scully's first call to quell similar unrest at Southeast was to the Veteran Corps. When the Mississippi River flooded in 1973, they were some of the first students on the scene sandbagging.

As early as 1970, veterans held the position of student body president and 10 percent of elected positions in student government. They also tallied the highest GPA of any organization on campus, according to several members.

Not bad, they said, for a group made up largely of men who flunked out of college before the war.

But the vets are quick to point out it wasn't all serious.

"We worked hard, and we played hard," said Tom Hahn, class of 1971. "More beer went through our house than almost any tavern in town."

They were a wild bunch after hours. Weekends were times for a no-pads tackle football game called the "Blood Bowl." They served up mulligan stew where everything in the fridge was a potential ingredient and pulled pranks like stealing the TKE fraternity's beloved bell.

They also handed out rotating party invitations to campus sororities.

"The fraternities all pretty much hated us," Hahn said.

Much of the mayhem went on in a two-story white barn off of Cape Rock Drive near Twin Trees Park. It was donated by a parent and served as the unofficial party spot for the group.

"No heat, no running water -- it was great," Nardie said.

Despite their war experience, they weren't above a little gallows humor.

Hahn remembers a skit the vets put on called "Incredible Stretching Man," where they pulled off the prosthetic legs of Mayer, a double amputee, to the screams of those watching.

"I told them, don't you dare pull my legs past the cuff and they said 'oh, yeah, sure.' Well, you can guess how that one ended," Mayer said.

Proceeds from the weekend's events will go toward supporting scholarships for children and grandchildren of Vietnam-era veterans. The scholarship is named after Michael Bauman of Ste. Genevieve, Mo., a member of of Veteran Corps who died several years ago.

tgreaney@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 245