A recent news story showed that people are far less likely today to know someone who is serving in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan than previous generations knew someone serving in past major conflicts such as Vietnam, Korea, World War II, etc.
That being said, there are a number of South Dakota born veterans who are known for their careers after the war as much or more than their military service.
Here are a few.
The star college and NFL quarterback was born in Parade, a tiny community on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation along U.S. Highway 212 in north central South Dakota.
Van Brocklin was so committed to doing his duty, he gave up his senior year in high school in 1943 to fight in World War II on a destroyer in the South Pacific.
When he got out of the Navy, he went back and finished high school, enrolled at Oregon and went on to gridiron fame.
Born in Deadwood, the father of basketball's fast break is another top level athlete and coach who many might not know began life his in South Dakota, much less western South Dakota.
Lambert, best known for his days as a coach at Purdue University, had his athletic career interrupted by World War I.
3. Oscar Howe
The renowned Native American artist served 3-1/2 years in the U.S. Army with combat forces in North Africa, Italy, France and Germany. Perhaps the most important development during his service in the Armed Forces came when he met and fell in love with Adelheid Hampel. They were engaged when he returned home alone in 1945. Two years later, he used money he won in an art contest to send for her and they got married in 1947.
South Dakota's elder statesman gets a lot of notoriety for his 1972 run for president and his strong stance against the Vietnam War. He lost miserably, failing even to get his home state, but the U.S. did exit the war shortly thereafter.
What some don't realize is that McGovern was a real-life war hero, flying 35 combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot in Europe and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.
1. Joe Foss
What wasn't Joe Foss?
He first was a leading "ace" fighter pilot in the United States Marine Corps during World War II, a 1943 recipient of the Medal of Honor, then a general in the Air National Guard, the 20th Governor of South Dakota, and then the first commissioner of the American Football League, to name a few.
He was also the parade marshal of the Days of '76 Parade in the mid-1980s when I was an intern at the Lead Daily Call under the tutelage of then-editor Pat Dobbs. Dobbs assigned me to do a story on Foss, and me being a young know-it-all with little belief in the pre-story research, asked him blithely who Foss was.
"He used to be the governor of South Dakota," Dobbs told me.
That was enough research for me. That is, until I spent the first half hour of the interview writing down his brief "bio" as background of the story.
It was at that point apologized to the larger-than-life Foss, to which he just laughed and had me pull up a chair and watch the parade with him.
I learned a lot of lessons from that interview. One big one was do your research before a story, no one else will do it for you.
But the biggest was about humility. Foss is probably the biggest national hero I ever interviewed, but you would never have been able to tell it from the interview that August day.
He died a few years back, but he leaves a legacy as perhaps the most well-liked South Dakotan in the state's history.
