Brockman was first Pettis County soldier to die in Vietnam War

Verndean Brockman, 31, was the first Vietnam War veteran from Pettis County to be killed.

He was born June 9, 1931, the third son of Wilbur A. and Amelia S. Wienberg Brockman. He attended Balke Prairie School in Benton County and High Point and Quisenberry schools.

His sister, Beulah Ehlers, said he would rather go fishing or hunting than attend school. He decided to follow the lead of his brothers, Melvin and Gene, and join the service when he was 17. He enlisted in the Army on Nov. 8, 1950.

He did his basic training at Fort Leonard Wood and additional training at Fort Campbell, Ky., and Fort Bragg, N.C. He went on to serve in the Korean War with his brother, Melvin.

His sister said he was a daredevil growing up, so it didn’t surprise her that he was chosen for the Special Forces Group. He became a Green Beret, after training in the Everglades in Florida.

The bulk of this training consisted of having to parachute out of a plane, land in swampland and survive for a few weeks alone with only a knife.

Whenever he would receive leave to come home, he wouldn’t tell his family. Instead he came up with creative ways to announce his arrival.

Beulah said one day she received a phone call from a man saying, “I’m ordered to deliver 500 pounds of ice out to your house, where do you want it?”

She told him nobody ordered any ice. He told her she’d better find a place and to wait on the porch. Someone would be there shortly. She was surprised to see her brother appear. He always pulled tricks like that.

The hardships began when Verndean was sent to Vietnam. At that time, he served in an advisory capacity. His mission was to teach the South Vietnamese how to defend themselves and how to fight in a war. This was difficult, because the Americans weren’t allowed to have any weapons.

During his first tour, he contracted hepatitis and was sent to the Philippines. He was in a coma for a while and wasn’t allowed to have any visitors. After he got better, he was told he wouldn’t be sent back into combat, but he was. Beulah thinks he asked to go back. He loved the military and wanted to make a career out of it.

A few months after he returned to Vietnam, he was leading a convoy and was killed by a sniper on Nov. 16, 1963.

“They shot him through one side and it came out the other side of his head. He was the only one. He was an interpreter. He knew about three or four different languages,” she said.

His parents received a telegram in the middle of the night on a Saturday. The police department called and told them.

“It’s kind of a traumatic thing to go through. It’s hard to accept because he was killed over there,” she said.

The military had a big funeral service for him in the Philippines, before his body was shipped to Travis Air Force Base in San Jose, Calif. His parents were making funeral arrangements with Dale Heckart, when they heard President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

Brockman’s body was on a train at the time and all trains were ordered to stop. It took more than two weeks for his body to get home.
His father previously had a coronary, so his children didn’t think he could handle seeing the body. Their mother also did not go.

“They (the funeral home) kind of left it up to the family as to say, ‘Do you want to show the body, or do you not want to?’ It was encased in glass. They did open it and do a little facial work. We said, ‘Well, with him being killed overseas and all that, there might be a lot of nosy people,’ so we decided to have a memorial service,” she said.

One thing that disturbed her was a few weeks after the funeral, a woman said to her, “I heard it from the horse’s mouth that he was just as black as tar.”

She replied, “I don’t know what horse talks to you, but I said that one didn’t know the truth.”

She did say he was very tan, because of the Vietnam climate.

When he died, no one really noticed or made a fuss about it.

“I guess there was so many killed at the time, people just kind of took it and went with it,” she said.

She said it wasn’t until Jim Gaertner started inquiring about building a memorial that people paid much attention. She’s very grateful for that.