Van of Valor

Interview Video at Bottom

By Dr. Kevin P. Wallace
Van of Valor

BARTELSO, Ill. – The Van of Valor was mid-way on its 27,000 miles across the contiguous United States over 280 consecutive days, further than the circumference of Earth itself, when we pulled into Bartelso, Illinois, on a warm August afternoon. 

The Standin’ Proud Veteran’s Tribute stood as a quiet sentinel in this small farming community of Bartelso, and we was there to meet a man whose name had been given to me by another veteran, who had heard it from another, as these stories so often travel.

David Maue came soon after. He stood near the memorial, a solid man with kind eyes and the quiet bearing of someone who had carried weight for a very long time. 

We shook hands, and I noticed the faint scars on his hands, the first visible evidence of a story that would unfold over the next several hours, a story of duty, survival, and a guilt that had taken decades to ease.

Maue was born in Breese, just down the road from where we sat, at the old hospital. 

Raised locally, he attended Althoff High School in Belleville, graduating in 1966. 

His father worked for a dairy in O’Fallon, and the family lived near Shiloh for a time. These were the coordinates of his early life, small towns with German names, farmland, the rhythms of the Midwest.

Then the draft notice came.

Maue entered the Army on August 8, 1969. He would separate in 1971, his tour cut short by about a month due to the de-escalation efforts near Christmas 1970. But between that August day and his return home lay an experience that would define the rest of his life.

The 1st Cavalry Division had moved from An Khe when Maue joined them. 

He was assigned to War Zone III, operating near Saigon, but the real work happened further north and west, along the infiltration routes near the Fish Hook and Parrot’s Peak, areas that bled across the border into Cambodia. 

The Ho Chi Minh Trail pulsed with enemy movement just beyond the treeline.

“Triple canopy jungle,” Maue said, and the words carried the weight of memory. “You couldn’t see the sky. You moved in shadows, always listening.”

His platoon typically had about 20 men, though that number fluctuated with casualties and rotations. They would patrol for eight hours at a stretch, then set in for the night, Claymores out, automatic ambushes rigged, listening posts pushed forward. 

Every third or fourth day, a resupply helicopter would fight through the thick air to bring them food, ammunition, and mail. Those packets from home, written by mothers and sweethearts and wives, were the only light in the darkness.

“We’d stay out thirty, thirty-five days at a time,” Maue recalled. “Then we’d pull back to a firebase for a week. Refit. Shower, if we were lucky. Then back out.”

They carried 90-pound packs through the humidity, through the smell of rot and growth that hung in the air like a living thing. The “old guys” who showed him the ropes might have been in-country only a few days longer than he was. 

Casualties created vacancies, and vacancies created promotions. 

Maue rose through the ranks not because he sought advancement, but because the men ahead of him kept falling.

It was 1970, during the Cambodian Campaign, when the mission brought them to Parrot’s Peak. The platoon was understrength, 22 men instead of the usual 30-plus. A new man had joined them, assigned as the M-60 gunner. 

His name was Jim Brady.

“Jim came to us because he’d had some medical issue,” Maue said. “I don’t know what it was. But he was there, and I was supposed to train him. Show him the ropes. That’s what squad leaders do.”

Little birds, scout helicopters, had spotted a bunker complex below the canopy. 

It was active. 

They could see movement, smell smoke from cooking fires. Maue and the other squad leaders advised the lieutenant to pull back, to call in artillery, to do anything except what they were being ordered to do.

“He wanted us to set up right there. Right next to them.” Maue’s voice remained steady, but I could see the old frustration in his eyes. “We told him it was a bad idea. But he was a West Pointer, and he had his orders.”

They set up as directed. Maue made a critical decision: he positioned the machine guns facing toward the bunker complex. That small act of defiance, born of combat instinct, would matter more than anyone knew.

At dawn, as they began breaking camp, the world exploded.

“I was awake,” Maue said. “On one knee, near the gun. Jim was standing.”

The RPG came in low. It struck near them, and the shrapnel sprayed outward. Because Maue was low to the ground, the fragments caught him in the hands. Jim Brady, standing, took the blast to his neck and spine. He was killed instantly.

“The A-gunner—the guy designated to carry ammunition for the 60—he was killed right next to me too.” Maue paused. “The medic went down trying to get to Jim.”

In the chaos of the ambush, with enemy fire coming from multiple directions, Maue’s decision to position the machine guns toward the bunker likely saved the rest of the platoon. They were able to return fire, to suppress the enemy long enough to call in a medevac.

But the medevac couldn’t land. The triple canopy jungle prevented any helicopter from touching down. Instead, they lowered the jungle penetrator, a heavy metal cage on a cable designed to punch through the foliage.

“They’re sitting ducks up there,” Maue said. “A hovering helicopter is the biggest target in the world. But they came anyway.”

The wounded were extracted one by one, hauled up through the trees while enemy fire sought them. The dead would be recovered later.

Maue paused in his telling, and I waited. The afternoon sun had shifted, and the shadow of the memorial had grown longer.

The fighting did not end with that ambush. If anything, it intensified. For the next month, Maue’s unit pushed up a hill in Cambodia, engaging the enemy daily in what became a grinding, exhausting ascent.

“We were climbing and fighting for about a month,” he said. “And when we got to the top, we found something nobody expected.”

Buried in the hill were Conexes—military shipping containers. And inside those containers, and in caches surrounding them, was enough material to supply an army. Weapons, ammunition, supplies. And automobiles.

“Mercedes-Benz cars,” Maue said, and for the first time a hint of wonder entered his voice. “In the middle of the jungle. How they got them there, I still don’t know. The Ho Chi Minh Trail had roads wide enough for deuce-and-a-half trucks, but Mercedes? We couldn’t figure it.”

Each soldier was allowed to take one item from the cache. Maue chose a brand-new SK rifle, a weapon he still remembers clearly. Years later, a buddy in Indiana would send him a list of everything recovered from that hill. It was one of the largest caches discovered during the war.

But the hill had cost them. 

Two more men killed, four wounded on a single day when the enemy used a captured American Claymore mine, strapped to a tree and command-detonated. The point man, a soldier they called Popeye, spotted it just in time. The shrapnel caught Maue’s helmet but didn’t penetrate.

“Close,” he said. “So close.”

For decades after he returned home, Maue carried something heavier than any 90-pound pack. He carried Jim Brady.

“I was supposed to train him,” he said. “I was there to teach him. And circumstances said no.”

The phrase hung in the air between us. Circumstances said no. It was the most generous possible framing of a moment that had haunted him for over 50 years.

He found some help through a P.T.S.D. “rap group” at Scott Air Force Base, one of the early veteran support groups that understood that talking was medicine. But the guilt persisted, a low hum beneath the surface of his life.

Then, years later, the internet made possible what distance had prevented. Maue connected with Jim Brady’s younger brother. They exchanged messages, shared memories, and slowly, carefully, Maue began to open a door he had kept sealed for half a century.

“He sent me photos from Jim’s funeral,” Maue said. “I’d never seen them. Never knew.”

The photos confirmed what Maue had always known in his bones: that Jim Brady had died instantly, that he hadn’t suffered. That knowledge, hard as it was, brought something like peace.

“Connecting with his family helped,” Maue said quietly. “It helped a lot.”

I asked if he had forgiven himself.

“Yes,” he said. “I did everything I could. We all did. The lieutenant—he didn’t stay long after that. Rotated out. But we stayed. We kept fighting.”

The Man Next to You

As the afternoon lengthened, I asked Maue what he would tell a young person today, someone trying to decide about military service.

“Modern wars are political,” he said carefully. “They have no-fire zones and free-fire zones and rules that don’t always make sense from the ground. You have to follow your heart. Service isn’t for everyone.”

But then he added something that I’ve heard from so many veterans, in so many ways, that I’ve come to understand it as the core truth of combat:

“They say you’re fighting for your country. That’s true, but you’re really fighting for the guy next to ya. Trying to keep him alive.”

He paused, and I could see him turning something over in his mind.

“You’re never degraded by military service,” he continued. “You can’t call it a lost two years or lost four years, because what you get out of it—it’s friendships, people you meet. That was my big thing, and I’ll never, never forget it.”

The friendships. The people you meet. The man next to you.

Jim Brady stood next to Maue for only a short time. But in that time, Maue trained him, positioned him, and then watched him fall. And for the rest of his life, Maue has carried that moment—not as a burden, but as a responsibility. To remember. To honor. To tell.

As we concluded the interview, Maue asked how many stories we were collecting. I told him about the Van of Valor’s journey, 27,000 miles, 280 consecutive days, 317 Purple Heart recipients and Gold Star families and other heroes interviewed. 

I told him about my wife and partner, Lauren Wallace, the anthropologist and historian who has helped shape this mission, and about the volunteers who make it possible.

“We have interviews scheduled into next year,” I said. “The stories keep coming.”

Maue nodded. He understood. The stories do keep coming, because the men and women who lived them keep carrying them, and because there are those of us who believe that carrying them together is lighter than carrying them alone.

Before we parted, Maue mentioned that he also had a Purple Heart—the one he’d earned in that Cambodian ambush, when shrapnel tore through his hands as Jim Brady fell beside him. He didn’t make a show of it. He didn’t need to. The scars on his hands spoke clearly enough.

I’ve thought often about Maue since that August afternoon in Bartelso. 

About the small German Catholic farming communities of southern Illinois that sent their sons to war. About the men who came home and the men who didn’t. About a squad leader who positioned machine guns toward an enemy bunker against orders and saved lives. About a new gunner named Jim Brady who never got to be an old guy.

Maue’s story is one of 317 we’ve collected, and there will be more. But it stands out for its clarity about what matters most. Not politics. Not strategy. Not even country, exactly.

The man next to you. Keeping him alive. And when you can’t, carrying him with you, and eventually, maybe, finding a way to let the carrying become an honor rather than a kind of weight.

At the end of our time together, I thanked Maue for his service, a phrase that has become so routine it sometimes loses meaning. But I meant it in the most literal way possible. He had served. He had served his country, his unit, and most of all, the man next to him. And then he had served again, by sitting with a stranger in the shadow of a veterans memorial and telling the truth about what happened.

That is its own kind of Purple Heart. Its own kind of valor.

Dr. Kevin P. Wallace is the founder of Van of Valor, a project dedicated to capturing the oral histories of Purple Heart recipients, Gold Star families, and American heroes. Since 2024, he and his team have traveled over 27,000 miles across the contiguous United States, conducting interviews that preserve the stories of those who served. The Van of Valor continues its mission, with interviews scheduled into the coming year.

To nominate a veteran for an interview, or to support the Van of Valor’s work, visit www.HelpVoV.com