My Father was a Minnesota graduate with a PhD in Business Administration and Dean of the School of Business and Economics at UW-Whitewater in Wisconsin. He was killed in an airplane crash in Vietnam with 6 other educators from the upper Midwest while serving on a USAID mission that was studying the educational system in that country. The plane crash occurred in March of 1967 while I was a freshman at the U of M and at home on Easter Vacation. Obviously, I and my family were devastated. 

While a freshman at the Dental School at the U in 1969, I participated in several demenstrations against the war. I had lost two high school class mates killed in action during this war. After graduation I served in the US Public Health Service in New Orleans and thus was designated a Vietnam era War Veteran. 

In March of 2015 I was a member of a Dental Mission to South Vietnam in the Mekong Delta and while there I took a side trip to the crash site west of Danang. There I found an eye witness of the crash when he was only 12 years old. This trip was very emotional. 

This past March, I and my siblings attended a 50 year gathering of surviving family members.