Schools honor local veterans

Greybull High School graduates as young as last year’s class, alongside current students’ grandfathers and generations before, all flashed past on a slideshow in Buff Gym this Veterans Day.  

“It reaches into the heart of veterans, and we are very grateful,” speaker Jerry Ewen addressed the bleachers full of Greybull students, elementary through high school. 

Ewen himself graduated from GHS in 1967. He enlisted for the Vietnam War in 1968 to become a medivac air ambulance pilot, shipping off around 21 years old. Ewen recalled other classmates who served at the same time as him: John Clark and Tommy Kershner. He asked that everyone remember 1966 GHS grad Harold Lee Gibson, who lost his life at 19 years old on a Vietnam tour. 

“Let’s pledge to not forget Harold and all the others who have laid their lives on the altar of freedom for our great nation over the past two and a half centuries,” Ewen said. 

This is not the first time Ewen has spoken before a crowd. He gave a speech at the Women’s Vietnam Memorial in 2000, and another at the Wyoming Veteran Welcome Home Reunion in Casper in 2015. He shared a story and a Bible verse with his audience on Tuesday:

John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

During his time flying Huey helicopters for medical evacuations in Vietnam, Ewen and his team were called in for an urgent extraction. As Ewen’s crew arrived by air, the men on the ground were still under fire, and the ground commander told them to wait until they could get to a more protected landing zone. 

“As we circled overhead, we saw an enemy rocket hit in the middle of this group of soldiers, causing more of them to be wounded,” Ewen said. The ground commander radioed the air crew: they needed them badly but could not ask them to land. 

Ewen said that for the first and only time in his Vietnam tour, he looked to his crew for a vote. 

“I told them, ‘One no vote means we don’t go in until they get the situation stabilized.’ Every one of them, the copilot, the crew chief and the medic, all well-seasoned, were quick to say, ‘Let’s go,’” Ewen told the story. “I wanted desperately to say no myself, but I couldn’t do it either.”

As Ewen descended, he recalled saying a prayer, the only time he remembered doing so in Vietnam despite being raised with religion. They went in under fire. 

“God was with us, there is no other explanation for what happened,” he said. As the helicopter descended, injured were loaded, and they left again for the hospital, not one bullet struck the aircraft. 

Ewen said that what made the mental and physical toil of service worth it for him were the connections it brought; the generations that were able to thrive because of veterans’ work and being able to speak with others who shared similar experiences to him. 

“Veterans Day was meant to build connections. It’s why we are here: to bridge the gap between those who served and those who were served,” Ewen said. Tongue-in-cheek, he asked students to see veterans other than old guys in baseball caps reminiscing, but as their teachers, coaches and young people with new families. 

“If we are to truly honor them, we have to start seeing them clearly. Not as victims, and not as political agendas, but as leaders and as community builders whose experience belongs at the center of our national story. We must learn to connect with them and with each other,” Ewen said. 

The Buffs Nation Band played the opening “Star Bangled Banner” with vocals by Dakoby Bentley and Corrie VanderPloeg and closed with “Liberty March.” The Voca Illumina and Cantate Chorale, a combination of the Greybull’s high school and middle school choirs, also performed. The GMS Student Council led the proceedings, and Josie Collingwood wrote and read Ewen’s introduction. 

The ceremony concluded with teachers Kate Decker and Anissa Bree receiving Challenge Coins from Dist. 4 American Legion Commander and Wyoming Veterans Commissioner Bobby Werner for their work on the event. 

“This Veterans Day and every day, together, let’s learn to connect, to listen and to heal. May God bless you, may he bless this school and this community, and may God bless America,” Ewen ended his speech.