Instead of writing about how the fallen soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors died, the class aims to keep the memories of how they lived before the war alive.

T.J. Martin, dean of distance learning at Iowa Central, and Kurt Schmid, assistant professor in social science, are teaching the course “Local Vietnam History.”

The class’ multi-year project is to create short biographies of those local servicemen in the college’s nine-county region, which will eventually be compiled into an anthology to be published.

“What we wanted to do is to honor the lives who were lost in Vietnam,” Martin said. “Our goal is to bring their memory to life.”

Were they a jokester? Did they help raise their younger siblings? What were they like as a young kid? Were they an outstanding athlete? Did they work hard on the family’s farm?

These are some of the questions this project hopes to answer.

The class was first held last spring semester. It’s usually a small class – there are just five students enrolled this semester – and each student is assigned five biographies to research, interview and write.

The class started with a list of 53 names, Martin said.

“We’re just over halfway through,” he said.

To learn about the servicemen from before they enlisted, commissioned or were drafted, the students are interviewing surviving family members and friends.

Student Kristal Ried, a sophomore from Newell, is having a hard time finding information about the servicemen she’s researching.

“Family members are hard to find because names change, or you’ll find a relative but it’s someone who didn’t actually know the person because it’s two or three generations later,” she said. “Just trying to find a relative who did know the soldier is really difficult.”

Ried is a political science and psychology double-major and decided to take the class even though it doesn’t necessarily fit with her majors.

“I was just very interested in sharing the stories of who these men were before they went into the war,” she said. “I thought it would be interesting to see this side of them instead of just the soldier side of them. These were people and they had lives too.”

The class this semester has helped Ried with her people skills and her interview skills, she said.

Allan Murray and Matthew Helmers, both sophomores majoring in education, were sort of “recruited” to the class from friends who had previously taken the course and from the instructors, who they knew from other courses they’ve had.

For Helmers, a Manson native, the class fits right in with what he plans to do in his career.

“I’m a big history guy, that’s what I’m going to teach,” he said.

Murray, who is from Fort Dodge, is working on the biographies on a few Fort Dodge servicemen.

Interviewing a surviving brother of U.S. Army Lt. Col. Leslie Crouse, who was killed in Vietnam in September 1968, Murray learned some childhood stories.

“He was the oldest of eight kids, so he was kind of the disciplinarian,” Murray said. “When they would act up, he’d tell them he was going to get ‘the boss,’ which was an old boat oar, and chase them with it as a joke.”

Murray said he’s enjoyed the interviews, but is a little intimidated about writing the short biographies because he wants to do their stories justice.

Helmers had the opportunity to get together with a few of the surviving siblings of U.S. Army Pfc. Class Dennis Yetmar, of Clare, to hear about their childhood stories playing with the scores of neighborhood kids on the street the kids dubbed “battle row” in Clare.

This project has been eye-opening for several of the students – most of whom were born more than three decades after the end of the Vietnam War.

“The way I look at it is I’ve got good buddies that are in the service who aren’t much older than me, and often the gentlemen that we’re researching are our age,” Helmers said. “They’re 20-years-old and went off to Vietnam and they never made it back.”

Martin and Schmid plan to continue offering the course each semester until all the names have been marked off the list. The class is open to all Iowa Central students, including high schoolers who are dual-enrolled, or just anyone who wants to take the class for non-credit.

Schmid said there might be an option to take the class as an independent study during the summer session this year.

There are still some servicemen on the list that the instructors and students are having trouble finding survivors who knew them. That list is located at the end of this story. Anyone with information or leads on how to contact family and friends of the men on the list are asked to contact Martin at martin@iowacentral.edu or 515-574-1097.

Survivor information needed for:

Thomas Richard Poundstone, Jack Rae Smith, Loren Francis Studer and Richard Wehrheim, all of Clarion. Melvin Eugene Thompson of Fonda. David Allen Fleskes, Donald Henry Holm, Donald Kay Lakey, William Harrison Pease and Daryl David Shonka, of Fort Dodge. Rickey Eugene Swaney, of Grand Junction. Frederick August Holst, of Knierim. Melvin Dale Miller, of Newell. Robert F. Fox, of Odebolt. Wayne Thomas McGuire, of Peterson. Calvin William Binder II, of Rembrandt. Keith Russell Heggen, of Renwick. James “Jimmy” Lee Buckley, Randall Gaylord Freeman, Gerald Claude McKeen and Larry Eugene Smith, of Sac City. Herman Smits Jr., of Scranton. Thomas William Carrington, of Storm Lake. LaRoy Frederich Roth, of Lake City.