These days, Bill Irwin can be seen each Wednesday of the week at the Missouri Veterans Home in St. James, where he volunteers at the canteen. There, he’s often found behind the counter serving up ice cream, cold drinks and other treats to the home’s approximately 90 residents.

Irwin doesn’t live at the Veterans Home, but loves to spend time there serving his fellow veterans of the armed services.

“Once you’re a veteran, you’re a veteran,” Irwin said. “It’s not something that you necessarily get out of your blood.”

Irwin was born in Bon Terre. From a military family himself, he flew between Holland, where his family was stationed, and United States Army Garrison Wiesbaden, in Germany, where he attended high school.

In 1959, four days after he graduated high school, Irwin enlisted in the United States Air Force, where he wanted to become a jet mechanic.

Instead, Irwin was sent to the School of Aerospace Medicine in San Antonio, Texas, where he would be trained as a medic.

“I was really disappointed,” Irwin said of his assignment as a medic.

Irwin’s initial medical training took place at Greenville Air Force Base in Mississippi before he returned to the School of Aerospace Medicine to receive additional training in his specialty.

His first assignment took him to the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. The base housed a fighter unit, a tanker unit and numerous helicopters, in part because of its role supporting nearby Minuteman missile installations.

Irwin worked at the flight surgeon’s office, eventually advancing through the Air Force’s medical training and qualification system and earning the qualifications necessary to receive his flying status.

Irwin flew most of his assignments on the Kaman HH-43 Huskie, a model used primarily for firefighting and rescue missions that served at numerous military airbases, and which was also deployed extensively during the Vietnam War during life-saving rescue missions. The HH-43 is famous for its synchronized, intermeshing rotors. It also carried 1,000-pound fire suppression kits that were used to extinguish fires in places that vehicles couldn’t easily reach.

When Irwin was in the service, Kaman, the manufacturer of the HH-43, awarded a medal to crew members on the aircraft after they saved their first life.

Irwin earned his Kaman medal when he was stationed in Montana, where he and his crew saved the life of a civilian hiker who had fallen in the mountains and cracked her head open.   Today, he proudly wears the badge on his HH-43 Huskie baseball cap, along with his aviator badge, and other medals earned during his time in the service.

Irwin’s service also brought him overseas to places like Japan, Thailand, Spain and Turkey.

In 1965, Irwin received temporary duty orders to join 909th Air Refueling Squadron, also known as the Young Tigers, at the Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, Japan, where he spent several months. Irwin was also sent to the Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base in Udon Thani, Thailand.

His assignment also brought him into contact with some of the dangers faced by servicemen. While he was stationed at the Izmir Air Station in Izmir, Turkey, Irwin and his crew responded after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck the Gediz region of the country, killing over a thousand people.

Irwin and his fellow servicemen flew rescue missions and administered first aid to the Turks caught in the earthquake.

“We took our ambulance — we called it a flyaway dispensary with medical staff and all, and we went there to help out. The Red Crescent was in charge of the medical side, because a lot of people couldn’t speak English to tell you what was hurting. We mostly administered first aid,” Irwin said, adding that, when tending to the obviously injured, having a shared language didn’t matter. “If you see blood, then you know what to do.”

After another assignment in Spain, Irwin was stationed at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington D.C., where the HH-43 was used to cover Air Force One and Air Force Two’s presidential and vice presidential takeoffs and landings.

Toward the end of 1972, months before the HH-43 Huskie would be taken out of service, Irwin had made his final flight on the aircraft, covering a flight for President Richard Nixon.

The majority of HH-43s were taken out of service the following year, and according to Irwin, a great number of them were used as target practice for later models of aircraft and were shot down over the Gulf of Mexico in subsequent years.

Today, one of the HH-43s that Irwin himself flew can still be seen on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

After leaving active duty in 1973, Irwin spent two more years as a reservist before retiring from the armed services as a technical sergeant. Following retirement, Irwin enjoyed a long career as a truck driver in California and Arizona before retiring in St. James in 2006, where he has lived since.

In 1968, while Irwin was stationed in New Mexico, nearly nine years into his service, Patrick Fundell, a resident at the St. James Veterans Home, was a recent high school graduate from Princeton, Ill., where he was born and raised.

Then, Fundell was working with harness race horses in Pompano, Fla. When he was 18, Fundell wanted to enlist as an army photographer.

The recruiting officer at the Coral Gables recruitment office, where Fundell found himself, informed Fundell that the army’s photography school in Fort Dix, N.J., wouldn’t start for several more months.

“Well, the army’s not going to let me sit around and do nothing,” Fundell said, who decided to volunteer for the draft, a two-year enlistment.

Fundell was sent to Fort Jackson, S.C. for a brief time before being sent to Fort Gordon, Georgia, for basic training.

“Basic was just that — basic,” Fundell said. “They taught you how to salute, how to march, how to dress, et cetera.”

Fundell added that one of his strongest memories from his time training at Fort Gordon was the thick, intensely red Georgia clay that had to be “spit shined” off of his two pairs of army-issued boots after each day of drilling.

Fundell was one of three men in his company who scored high on their Armed Forces Qualification Tests.

As Fundell remembered it, their drill sergeant pulled him and two others aside and gave them a form to fill out for referral to West Point, a famed service academy in West Point, New York.

The drill sergeant’s instructions, according to Fundell: “Don’t fold it, don’t wrinkle it, because you won’t get another one.”

Fundell, who was a temporary squad leader, took the form to his private room in his company’s third barracks, and placed it underneath his pillow to keep it safe and crisp.

That night, after drill and mess, Fundell returned to his room to fill out the form, which had to be done by typewriter.

“So, I got done eating and I went back to my room and I picked up my pillow,” Fundell said. “Oh my God! There’s my form wrinkled badly.”

Fundell said he thinks that someone slept in his private room, wrinkling his ticket to the best service academy in the country — and he wasn’t getting another one.

“I’m looking at this, and I’m going ‘oh, man,’ and I just threw it in the trash, so no recommendation to West Point,” Fundell said. “I could have explained why it was wrinkled, because you’d have to be a stupid idiot to wrinkle a form that would get you recommended to West Point. But I wasn’t that smart. I threw it out.”

Instead of finding himself on a bus to West Point, Fundell was headed to Fort Polk, La.

“That’s where we got into the real training for Vietnam,” Fundell said. “We learned how to camp out, sleep, make pup tents and pull the night guard.”

After finishing weeks of grueling training at Fort Polk, Fundell went back home to Princeton for one month’s leave before he would head to Vietnam for the first time.

“I got on an airplane and flew from O’Hare Airport in Chicago to Oakland, California,” Fundell said.

One of his strongest memories from the staging area in Oakland was the massive warehouse he and the others in his company were housed before being shipped off to Vietnam.

“We got to stay in the warehouse, and I walked through all these hundreds of warehouse buildings and they had thousands of bunks, stacked six bunks high, that stretched all the way to the end of the warehouse,” Fundell said. “Hundreds of thousands of soldiers.”

Three days after arriving in Oakland, Fundell was on an airplane to Alaska for a refuel, then on to Vietnam. On that flight, Fundell said he wished he’d had a six-pack of beer.

Fundell was assigned to the 4th Infantry Division, First Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, known as the “Red Warriors,” who operated out of the city of Pleiku in South Vietnam.

One memory that remains with Fundell is the first bus ride he took shortly after arriving in Pleiku.

“I got on the bus, and the seats were wooden boards. There was no glass in the windows. It was a wire mesh (window),” Fundell said, later learning that wire mesh windows were used in the buses because they could better repel grenades that the Viet Cong would at times throw into U.S. personnel carriers.

He also recalled, on that bus ride, witnessing Vietnamese locals, so starved by war-driven famine, eating the lice out of each other’s hair.

He recalled seeing a “mamasan,” a term used by U.S. military personnel to describe an older Vietnamese woman of authority, “sitting up on a kind of curb, and she’s picking something out of the mamasan’s hair, putting it in her mouth. It was protein, food, and that’s what they were hungry for, was food. And in the meantime, we’re driving down the road, and I thought, “What the f– have I got myself into?” Fundell said.

A helicopter trip later, Fundell joined up with his company, which was “set up in a perimeter out in the jungle,” where Fundell was assigned the M79, a shoulder-fired grenade launcher first used in Vietnam.

As Fundell told it, his first two weeks on the front lines were quiet, until they weren’t.

“We went humping. I’m with the company and we came on a hillside, and our azimuth took us right across this clearing,” Fundell said, pointing out that the prudent thing to do would be to stay in the cover of the dense forest jungle on either side of the clearing.

“But our captain told us first squad, first platoon, to cut on through the clearing. And they did,” Fundell said. “Right up here in an L-shape was the NVA (North Vietnamese Army), and the first two squads got wiped out immediately.”

According to Fundell, the first, second and third squads of the first platoon were wiped out, leaving the second platoon exposed in the clearing.

Fundell’s luck was that he was in the third platoon, third squad, with enough distance from the fighting to spread out and defend themselves. The fighting, Fundell said, went on for five days and four nights.

“In that time, I had gone through my grenades, so I’m looking around and the machine gunner, he ain’t moving. So I crawl over there and I grab the machine gun,” Fundell said.

The M60 Fundell found himself carrying could fire 550 rounds a minute, with every seventh round being a tracer round. The tracer rounds help the gunman shoot accurately, but are also a dead giveaway of the shooter’s position.

The battle lasted five days and four nights. “In the meantime, we were shooting away, and then that fourth night, it just went quiet. No more shooting,” Fundell said. He added that it was difficult for his regiment to evacuate their wounded by helicopter.

“We loaded up the wounded and then the helicopter would rise up and all of a sudden the NVA started shooting at it. The bullets would hit the engines and the people inside of it and it would come crashing down,” Fundell said.

After witnessing it happen to one helicopter, they told others not to come.

“And we just had to do the best we could with our wounded,” Fundell said.

Out of 130 soldiers in Fundell’s company, only 30 hadn’t been wounded or killed. Out of the seven men in Fundell’s squad, only three left the battle without serious physical wounds.

After the battle, Fundell and the others went back to their firebase, a type of forward operating base, and were relieved by their battalion’s Charlie Company.

“So now, our company, what was left of it after they took the dead and wounded, we went back to the firebase that Charlie (Company) just came out of. And we get back there, and now we get a whole bunch of FNGs put in with us. And me, I’m now considered a veteran because I had just been in a battle.”

In September 1969, while on R&R, Fundell came down with malaria. He battled 104-degree body temperatures for four straight days, and remembers how delirious the disease made him

“I can remember laying on a cot. I heard a noise, and I turned my head, and I looked over, and a guy had walked up to a faucet. He turned it on, and water came running out of it, and I thought, ‘oh, what a nice invention!’” Fundell said.

From his battle with malaria, Fundell also recalled how difficult it was to stomach food. For weeks while he recovered, he lived off a mixture of half white and half chocolate milk. Fundell also successfully battled malaria once more in Princeton, Ill., when he was on leave.

He would go on to fight in numerous other conflicts in both Cambodia and Vietnam during the remainder of his service. He left the service in June 1970 after an assignment in Fort Carson, Colo.

Fundell remained in Colorado, where he met his wife Deborah. The two married there in 1978, and Fundell built a career working as an accountant in Denver.

Fundell said that he is proud of his service in Vietnam, but questions the purpose of the conflict, which he said left him with lifelong medical disabilities.

“When I got out of the army, I said, ‘I am done with this man’s army. No more.’ I’m here now because I was in the army. Everything that is wrong with my body, I am 100 percent disabled,” Fundell said, adding that he lost many friends along the way. “And for what? It was a useless war. It’s still a communist country and we’re spending millions of dollars buying things from them.”

Fundell said that it easily could have been him who didn’t come home from the war.

“I’m amazed that I lived through it and didn’t get wounded or killed. I mean, if a guy hadn’t been standing where he was standing, I’d be dead right now,” Fundell said. “That’s the thing, you know. God’s will be done.”