Nebraska
Veterans club in NE's oldest prison is saluted at Vietnam vet reunion • Nebraska Examiner
LINCOLN — Every year, a wreath is placed on the grave of Beryl Zich.
It has been a solemn tradition since her death in 2005, a way to pay tribute to her love and dedication for her son, Larry, a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War, who was listed as missing in action until his remains were identified in 2022.
The flowers aren’t 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 among the betterment groups allowed to form at the state’s oldest prison.
Her boys
Along the way, the 25-40 inmates/veterans who gather twice a month behind prison walls got interested in the MIAs and prisoners of war from the Vietnam War. Eventually, they connected with Beryl Zich, the mother of an MIA, who began coming to the State Pen for their meetings.
She eventually referred to the veterans club members as “my boys” as the years passed, and as her son — who disappeared during a mission in 1972 — remained missing.
“Sometimes, I think those boys are the only ones who care,” she once remarked.
Jaime Obrecht and Roy Schoen, two long-time volunteers for the inmate club, related that story and others about the prison veterans organization at the 39th annual Nebraska Vietnam Veterans Reunion held this past weekend at the Marriott Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln.
The first motto for the State Pen veterans’ organization was “Forgotten and Disowned,” which, Schoen said, was how a lot of veterans felt back in the 1980s.
“We had a chip on our shoulder for quite a few years for how we were treated,” said Schoen, an Army veteran and a retired counselor with the veterans center in Lincoln.
He and Obrecht, a retired Lincoln teacher, first began volunteering with the prison group back in 1984, shortly after it was formed.
A war that ended 49 years ago
The Nebraska Vietnam Veterans Reunion began in 1985, Schoen said. It was organized by a group of vets who felt that a gathering would be helpful, not only to share stories and common experiences, but learn more about veterans benefits and organizations.
“There wasn’t much going on back then for (Vietnam) veterans,” he said. “Things have changed quite a bit. Slowly.”
About 300 veterans and their spouses registered for this year’s reunion, which included presentations about the State Pen’s Veterans Club, Agent Orange, a book about fallen veterans from Norfolk (see sidebar) and the evacuation from Afghanistan. The state office of Veterans Affairs also offered remarks.
There were a lot of dark-blue “Vietnam Veteran” ball caps among the participants, as well as MIA/POW shoulder patches and veterans’ reunion T-shirts. Some aging vets used canes to walk, or carried small tanks of supplemental oxygen, a testament to the advancing age of soldiers who served in a war that ended 49 years ago.
The reunion serves many of the same needs as the veterans club at the State Pen, said Schoen and Obrecht — bringing those with common experiences, and challenges, together.
The State Pen’s club has several projects besides the annual wreath on the grave of Beryl Zich, said Obrecht.
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 every Memorial Day, he said. More recently, club members have been crocheting hats and scarfs for residents of the state veterans home in Kearney.
Special housing unit
But club members have also served as mentors that “police themselves” in the sometimes challenging world of prison, Obrecht said. At times, they’ve served as informal counselors for inmates/veterans struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome, Schoen said.
I can’t imagine what it’s like to live (in prison) … but the club gives them something to take pride in.
– Jaime Obrecht, volunteer with the veterans club at the Nebraska State Penitentiary
In 2016, the state corrections department established a special housing unit exclusively for military veterans, which the two volunteers said has been greatly appreciated by the inmates who live there.
“It really was 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 the club meetings at the State Pen are much like the meetings held by the Legion or VFW — there’s a business meeting, followed by reports on projects and then an hour for visiting.
The club holds annual programs on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, and purchased the black MIA/POW flags that fly on the flagpole at the State Pen. They also helped obtain new headstones for inmate/veterans buried at the State Pen’s cemetery outside the prison walls atop Grasshopper Hill.
He said they especially like contributing to causes that help veterans on the outside, 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 take pride in,” Obrecht said.
Not just names on The Wall
Research into the military service of his father and other relatives helped inspire retired social studies teacher Keith Walton to write about the nine soldiers from his hometown, Norfolk, who died in Vietnam.
Walton, now 71 and living in Montana, gave a presentation this weekend on 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 27 years at Chadron, said that he’s always admired the way documentary film producer Ken Burns presented history — through the eyes of “average people,” not the generals or presidents.
So after producing papers on his father, a World War II medic, and a couple of other relatives, Walton embarked on telling the stories, in separate chapters, of the nine fallen soldiers Norfolk, “so they’re not just names on The Wall.”
He said he knew the names of a couple of the nine, but like many residents of Norfolk, didn’t know 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, as well as understandably sad, stories.
Two soldiers were “enlisted by judges” who told them if they didn’t enlist, they would be going to jail for offenses.
One soldier’s mother drove weekly from Norfolk to the ordinance plant in Grand Island to put in a week of work producing bullets for war before commuting back. She continued to work even after her son perished.
Scheurich — who realized a life-long dream of being a pilot — is still listed as missing in action, although the remains of his bombardier were identified a few years ago after exploration of the 1968 crash site on an island off the coast of North Vietnam.
Emma Bullerman is spending her summer riding around in fields with her dad, and she’s thrilled about it. It’s not just for fun, either — she’s interning for the Prairie Plains Resource Institute and working alongside her father to conserve Nebraska grasslands.
“Prairie Plains has literally been in my life since I was born. I guess you could say I’m a bit of a grasslands nepo baby,” Bullerman said. “My dad is the restoration director, so even as a kid I would be out helping him in the field.”
Today, Emma is taking a more active role in aiding her dad’s work to restore native prairies.
“A lot of my summer will be in the truck with him driving across Nebraska to collect the native grassland seeds that we put into our restoration sites,” she said. “Basically, I’m just learning the ropes of everything that goes into grassland restoration.”
As a teen, Bullerman thought she wanted to do anything but follow her dad’s footsteps. Eventually, a few stalled paths helped her rediscover her love for her hometown.
“In high school and coming into college, I really thought I wanted to leave Nebraska and do something totally different from my dad,” she said. “I tried a few other directions, but pretty quickly could tell that I wasn’t passionate about them. I took a semester off, and then my boss at Prairie Plains reached out about helping with social media.”
It didn’t take long for Bullerman to catch the bug for conservation work and switch her major to fisheries and wildlife, the same degree program her father graduated from in 1995. In fact, she is a fourth-generation Husker with strong ties to ag and food science. Her grandfather is Dr. Lloyd Bullerman, a former a professor of food science, microbiology and food safety at the university, and her aunt studied food science at NU as well.
Getting back to Prairie Plains in her early college years helped Bullerman realize that she, too, had a calling toward this field.
“Being out in the field with my dad one day, I had a moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I’ve been looking for. This is what I want to do.’ Finding my way back has been really, really beautiful.”
Working with her dad, she’s is feeling better than ever about her direction, her hometown and her future in Nebraska.
“Doing this work and studying at UNL has given me a whole new perspective on the state,” she said. “I used to be someone who was like, ‘I want to get out of here after I graduate.’ Restoring prairies and traveling all over Nebraska has helped me see that it’s so beautiful here, I just didn’t take the time to see it before.”
The future of data centers in Nebraska took center stage at a North Omaha town hall Thursday evening.
The event was hosted by State Sens. Terrell McKinney and Ashlei Spivey, who alongside Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh sponsored a bill in the Nebraska Legislature that looked to help regulate data centers.
Parts of their bill were adopted and passed in LB1010, which requires reports on annual power usage, water usage and ownership.
“Having this passed in a package showed a lot of bipartisan work,” Spivey told a crowd of attendees at Nelson Mandela Elementary School.
The proposed regulations were shaped in part by Bold Nebraska, an advocacy group focused on eminent domain and clean energy. Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party and founder of Bold Nebraska, said before the bill passed there were “zero laws on the books” to address a boom in data centers.
“If one is coming into the community, we wanted to make sure that there were some basic transparency things in place,” Kleeb said.
Political discussions around data centers heated up in recent months following reporting by the Flatwater Free Press that showed Google is considering a data center in Nebraska that could require more than three times the amount of power the entire city of Lincoln uses at peak demand in the summer.
The Nebraska Legislature recently passed another bill, LB1261, that allows private developers to build and own power plants to serve a large industrial customer, including data centers. That bill was proposed by the governor’s office and celebrated by Gov. Jim Pillen.
“Our state is once again taking a bold and strategic step – one that will create an environment that attracts business and multibillion dollar investment, while legally preserving Nebraska’s unique and consumer-friendly public power model,” Pillen said at the time.
At Thursday’s town hall, McKinney called LB1261 “the bogeyman bill.”
“It’s a bill that the governor pushed through the legislature to allow for data centers to create their own power,” McKinney said. “It’s a bill that I stood on the floor and said this is going to harm our communities.”
LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) – Hundreds of people are without power in southeast Nebraska after a severe storm passed through Thursday morning.
The Lincoln Electric System outage map showed 115 customers without power across the city at 11:36 a.m.
Norris Public Power District’s outage map also shows 45 customers affected by the storm. As of 11:36 a.m., there were nine active outages.
According to the Nebraska Public Power District outage map, 657 customers were affected by the storm. Most of the affected customers were near Plattsmouth in southeast Nebraska. As of 11:37 a.m., 27 customers remain without power.
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