On the heels of Veterans Day 2015, I read an up-lifting article about a dyslexic Vietnam Vet who conquered his learning challenges, saved numerous lives, earned 2 Purple Hearts and, to this day, still makes an enormous positive impact on the world. Information for this blog from Lou Michel,News Staff Reporter, Buffalo News.
Back when Timothy J. Kendall was getting ready to graduate from Kenmore East High School in 1965, his guidance counselor suggested that he join the Navy because he had difficulty learning and work in the civilian world might prove daunting. Kendall didn’t know it at the time, but he had dyslexia and, as a result, had trouble reading and memorizing.
“The Navy was out. I didn’t want to be on a small ship on a big ocean,” Kendall says. “I joined the Army.” The Army viewed him in a different light: They thought he was officer material. But while waiting to enter Officer Candidate School, he took an exam for Special Forces and passed, so he went into Green Beret training instead.
When given a choice of what specialty he wanted to pursue in Special Forces, he decided on the Medical Corps. And it was while he was taking intensive courses to become a medic that he diagnosed himself as dyslexic.
"I did a lot of research and found out what was going on. I didn’t tell anyone because I would have been thrown out of the program. I worked extra hard to get through the program and passed,” he says.
In Vietnam, Kendall served with a Green Beret unit in the Central Highlands, where he had many opportunities to practice what he had fought so hard to learn.
“We lived with the mountain people who were indigenous to the highlands; they were phenomenal people,” he says of the Montagnards. “We all lived in a camp, and there were 400 of us. I was the medic to everyone. Our job was to train the mountain people so they could go out and fight and take care of themselves. Our main job there was teaching.”
Danger was always part of the routine, and Kendall was wounded twice by mortar rounds. “I was in the wrong place at the right time,” he says with a chuckle in sharing how he received two Purple Hearts.
Earning the Combat Medical Badge, he says, was bittersweet. “To get the Combat Medic Badge, you have to be in combat and treat people,” he says. “That meant someone had to get hurt.”
<>Kendall recalls one evening when he was eating dinner, and his nerves were on edge.
“We knew we were going to see action, and some of the mountain people were nervous. One of them said, ‘Well, don’t worry, boxie here will take care of us,’ ” Kendall says, referring to the Vietnamese word that means doctor. “My heart came out of my chest with pride, knowing I was the guy who was going to take care of them. They trusted me that much.”
When it was Kendall’s time to return to the United States after his 10 months in Vietnam, he says, he was not eager to leave. “You have to understand that I felt really good that I was doing something that helped people, and they respected me,” Kendall says. “I wasn’t the dummy in the class. I was the guy they came to when they needed help.”
So it was with a reluctant heart that he returned home and started his higher education at Rosary Hill College, now Daemen.
“It was an all-girls Catholic college, and we were the first men to attend. They let veterans attend who were on the GI Bill. It is a good thing that I was married at the time,” Kendall says. “The nuns didn’t know what to do with us.”
He came close to graduating but decided to leave in his senior year. “I enjoyed the learning but got frustrated because I still had the dyslexia. I had a 2.0 (grade-point average), and that was pointed out to me. They didn’t know how hard I had worked for that 2.0.”
But while academic success eluded him, Kendall found his place in the work world. At the Dunlop tire plant in the Town of Tonawanda, he started as a laboratory technician. “After a year and a half, I moved into supervision and worked in production,” he says.
To this day, this veteran speaks with other vets about their own challenges and how to meet them head on. “I’m proud to talk about it. I help them understand not to be ashamed, but to go and get treated.”
And so this veteran remains in the trenches, helping others who have been scarred by war.