In Memory

Bruce Wallace - Class Of 1949

Bruce Wallace

Bruce Wallace  '49  passed away on August 28, 2004.

Jack E. Waltz '49 remembers:  I am greatly saddened.  Bruce graduated from South Pas in 1949 and continued on to Cal Tech for a year.  He then joined the Army as an enlisted man where he eventually won an appointment to West Point from the ranks, graduated and was commissioned Class of 1956.  He became an Air Force pilot and flew close and lethal ground support for the 1st Cavalry Division's bloody battle in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965, made immortal by the book "We Were Soldiers Once and Young" by Joe Galloway and then Lt. Col. Hal Moore...a bestseller.  Galloway is now senior military correspondent for the Knight-Ridder papers (he was on the ground at the Ia Drang as a reporter).  Moore was the commander on the ground where we lost 305 men in a very short several days.  Bruce is prominently mentioned in the book as one of the reasons they weren't overrun.  He retired as a full Colonel and became a successful attorney in the San Diego area.

Joe Galloway (via email) tells me they (the Ia Drang survivors) became good friends with Bruce, who literally saved their asses flying close ground support.  They attended Bruce's burial in Arlington National Cemetery last fall with full military honors.  They owed their survival to him.  Bruce requested to be buried at Arlington because he considered himself a warrior and wanted to be buried among fellow warriors.

Bruce is the second member of our Class of '49 to rest there.  Our Commissioner General, Clark McConnell, after graduating from Yale, became a naval officer and died in a navy plane crash in 1955 in Italy.  He also rests in Arlington.  Kenny Good '48, a superb human being and West Point graduate in 1952 was killed in Vietnam in the early days as an advisor to the South Vietnamese Army.  Neil Sheehan won a Pulitzer Prize with his book "A Bright Shining Lie" about Vietnam.  Kenny's death is described therein.  Classes before ours, especially before and during WW II, contributed heavily to our country.