Kenneth Thresher: A Sad Christmas, a Sister’s Love

Christmas Day is associated with beautifully decorated trees hovering above colorfully-wrapped gifts, families gathered around a dinner table, the scent of pine and gingerbread and air filled with chatter. The Thresher family received on their Christmas Eve of 1967 news from two Marines on their Milwaukee doorstep that their son and brother had stepped on a 60-pound land mine and had been killed in Vietnam.

Before he died, Kenneth Eugene Thresher, of Milwaukee, and his younger sister, Bonnie Brandt, would follow a family tradition of going to St. Matthews Church, a church they attended regularly throughout the year together, on Christmas Eve. Their mother always made sure they were dressed best for the occasion. Brandt remembers most vividly her brother’s smile and one particular memory of them riding a bike together.

“We had a bicycle and I was sitting on the handlebar and he let go, and I fell right through the gas station window we were next to,” Brandt said, with laughter between her recollection of the memory as she spoke from her Tigerton, Wis. home. “He goes ‘oh my God.’ He was apologetic, but then said, ‘As long as you’re not dead, you’re okay’ and we left.”

They both rode the bus together going to Milwaukee’s Riverside University High School, until the day Thresher, at age 19, received the draft letter to serve in the Vietnam War. Brandt was 17 at the time.

“You either went in to war or went to Canada, and my mom and dad would have never forgiven him if he went to Canada,” Brandt said. Their father had enlisted into the Navy in earlier years, but once he returned home, Brandt recalls, he never spoke a word about the war. After travelling from Milwaukee to camp in California, Thresher was then sent to battle in Vietnam.

It was October of 1967 when Vietnam veteran Robert Meadows was assigned to Thresher’s platoon within the most highly decorated regiment in the Marine Corps, 2^nd Battalion, 5^th Marine Regiment. Meadows was Thresher’s squad leader.

“He was a well-liked and well-appreciated young man. Kenny was a joker, but he took his job serious,” Meadows said in an interview with Media Milwaukee. “We all talked about what we would do when we got home. They didn’t realize maybe two out of five were going home.”

Meadows was beside Thresher during a road sweep from their base camp in An Hoa on Liberty Road.

“We called it Road of the Legless. I don’t know how many Marines were killed on that road, but a lot of them lost their leg on that road,” Meadows said. “That was probably one of the heaviest booby-trapped areas in Vietnam.”

They were traveling across Liberty Road knee-deep in mud during a monsoon. Thresher asked if he could use Meadow’s flak jacket, and he obliged. On their right flank, they heard another soldier hollering for a medivac. From several feet away, Meadows witnessed Thresher take a few steps from the road to assist the soldier’s shout for help and the explosion from the mine that sent Thresher’s body flying.

“All that was left from him was his head and his chest, the helmet was still on his head. He never had a chance to cry,” Meadows said, “They put him in a body bag and in a helicopter, and he was gone. I never got my flak jacket back.”

Meadows also recalls that Thresher was close to finishing his tour around the time of the incident and that his body didn’t return home until almost two months after the incident.

Brandt remembers the funeral like it was yesterday.

“The funeral was very cold. It was very, very quiet, kind of an eerie feeling. When bodies came home from Vietnam they had to be glass enclosed.” Their mother, Brandt says, once joyful and lively, became an entirely different person after that Christmas Eve in 1967.

“She hated the world after my brother passed away; nothing meant anything more to her. The only thing they offered in them days were the minister, and that could only go so far since she didn’t accept that help.”

Brandt never went back to Riverside because she couldn’t see herself being there without her brother. The Thresher family moved away from the house in Milwaukee to Bowler, Wisconsin because they couldn’t see it being their home without Kenneth’s presence. Brandt stands by the vision of her brother being a hero who helped protect lives. Meadows also sees him as a hero and misses the many soldiers he hopes to meet when his time comes.

“I’ve got what you could call survivor guilt. Even though I’ve got three purple hearts, it won’t bring any of them boys back,” Meadows said. “Kenny was a good Marine, and I know he is resting in heaven with the rest of them.”