Veterans club at Northeast’s oldest prison honored at Vietnam veterans reunion • Nebraska Examiner
LINCOLN – Every year a wreath is laid on the grave of Beryl Zich.
Since her death in 2005, this has been a solemn tradition to honor her love and devotion to her son, Larry. Larry was a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War and was missing in action until his remains were identified in 2022.
The flowers do not come from a traditional veterans organization, but from a group of inmates at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.
For more than 40 years, a “Veterans Club” has been one of the groups allowed to form in the state’s oldest prison to improve the quality of life.
Your boys
Over time, the 25 to 40 inmate/veterans who meet twice a month behind prison walls became interested in missing soldiers and prisoners of war from the Vietnam War. Eventually, they came into contact with Beryl Zich, the mother of a missing soldier, who began coming to their meetings at the State Pen.
Over the years, she eventually came to refer to the members of the veterans club as “my boys” because her son, who disappeared during a deployment in 1972, remained missing.
“Sometimes I think the boys are the only ones who care,” she once remarked.
Jaime Obrecht and Roy Schoen, two longtime volunteers with the inmates’ club, told these and other stories about the prison veterans’ organization at the 39th annual Vietnam Veterans of Nebraska reunion held last weekend at the Marriott Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln.
The first motto of the veterans organization State Pen was “Forgotten and Forsaken,” which Schoen said reflected the feelings of many veterans in the 1980s.
“We were angry for years about the way we were treated,” says Schoen, an Army veteran and retired counselor at the Veterans Center in Lincoln.
He and Obrecht, a retired teacher from Lincoln, began their volunteer work in 1984, shortly after the prison group was founded.
A war that ended 49 years ago
The Vietnam Veterans Reunion in Nebraska began in 1985, Schoen said. It was organized by a group of veterans who felt a reunion would be helpful not only to share stories and shared experiences, but also to learn more about veterans’ services and organizations.
“There wasn’t much going on for (Vietnam) veterans back then,” he said. “Things have changed quite a bit. Slowly.”
About 300 veterans and their spouses have registered for this year’s meeting, which included presentations on the State Police Veterans Club, Agent Orange, a book about fallen Norfolk veterans (see sidebar) and the Afghanistan evacuation. The state Office of Veterans Affairs also gave speeches.
Among the attendees, many wore dark blue baseball caps emblazoned with the words “Vietnam Veterans,” as well as shoulder patches reading “Missing in Action/Prisoner of War” and T-shirts reading “Veterans Reunion.” Some aging veterans used canes or carried small oxygen tanks, evidence of the advancing age of soldiers who served in a war that ended 49 years ago.
The meeting serves many of the same purposes as the State Pen Veterans Club, Schoen and Obrecht said – bringing together people with shared experiences and challenges.
The State Pen’s Club has several projects in addition to the annual wreath-laying at Beryl Zich’s grave, Obrecht said.
Club members have made more than 511,000 red paper poppies for the American Legion Auxiliary, which distributes them as a tribute and fundraiser on the Friday before each Memorial Day, he said. Most recently, club members have crocheted hats and scarves for residents of the state veterans home in Kearney.
Special housing unit
But club members have also served as mentors, “policing themselves” in the sometimes difficult world of prison, Obrecht said. Sometimes they have served as informal counselors for inmates/veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder, Schoen said.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to live (in prison)… but the club gives them something to be proud of.
– Jaime Obrecht, volunteer at the Nebraska State Penitentiary Veterans Club
In 2016, the State Department of Corrections set up a special housing unit exclusively for war veterans. According to the two volunteers, it was highly appreciated by the inmates living there.
“It was really a remarkable change,” Schoen said. “They were more relaxed, they didn’t have to deal with all the craziness in the rest of the prison.”
Obrecht said club meetings at the State Pen are very similar to Legion or VFW meetings: There is a business meeting, followed by project reports and then an hour for visits.
The club hosts annual programs on Memorial Day and Veterans Day and purchased the black MIA/POW flags that fly on the State Pen flagpole. They also helped obtain new headstones for inmates/veterans buried in the State Pen cemetery outside the prison walls on Grasshopper Hill.
He said they especially enjoy contributing to causes that help veterans overseas, such as the annual wreath for Beryl Zich.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to live (in prison) … but the club gives them something to be proud of,” Obrecht said.
Not just names on the wall
Research into the military service of his father and other relatives inspired retired social studies teacher Keith Walton to write about the nine soldiers from his hometown of Norfolk who died in Vietnam.
Walton, now 71 and living in Montana, gave a lecture this weekend about his book “The Last Full Measure: From America’s Heartland to the Battlefields of Vietnam. Remembering the Fallen from one Nebraska Town.”
Walton, who taught at Chadron for 27 years, said he always admired the way documentary producer Ken Burns presented history – from the perspective of “ordinary people,” not generals or presidents.
So, after compiling documents about his father, a Second World War medic, and some other relatives, Walton began to tell the stories of the nine soldiers who died in Norfolk in individual chapters, “so that they are not just names on the wall.”
He said he knew the names of some of the nine, but like many Norfolk residents, not all of them – Jerry Allen, Dennis Anderson, Jerome Chandler, Roger Hunt, Jerold Meisinger, Thomas Scheurich, Steven Strube, Claude Van Andle and Michael Wemhoff.
Walton uncovered some remarkable, but also understandably sad, stories.
Two soldiers were “recruited by judges” who told them that if they did not enlist, they would go to prison for criminal offenses.
One soldier’s mother drove from Norfolk to the munitions factory in Grand Island every week to spend a week making munitions for the war effort before commuting back. She continued to work even after her son died.
Scheurich, who fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a pilot, is still missing, although the remains of his bombardier were identified several years ago during an exploration of the 1968 crash site on an island off the coast of North Vietnam.
