This Week's Meeting: October 28, 2015

 

Ronald Mackedanz, Vietnam veteran from Kandiyohi, is the author of Drafted: Greetings -You Have Been Selected By Your Friends and Neighbors.  The book is the true story of what it was like being a product of the Baby Boom, growing up in a fast-changing world, and being a small spoke in the big green wheel of a very unpopular war. It's also about surviving the war, only to return to a country full of anti-war sentiment and great disdain for its own young men that they had sent off to war. These are the memoirs of a man who has answered his country's call, served in the jungles, rice paddies, and rubber plantations of South Vietnam. In 2011, he received his Silver Star for gallantry in action from Command Sgt. Maj. Doug Hanson of Atwater during  Mackedanz was honored for actions in 1969 in Vietnam, pushing back the enemy with a grenade launcher and machine gun. He then helped with the evacuation of wounded soldiers, while hurt himself.