FAIRBURY - He served two year-long tours of duty, navigating rivers and active warfare in Vietnam before returning home to work at a co-op and for the highway department.

March's Jefferson County Veteran of the Month is Southeast Nebraska native Roger Garton.

Born in Beatrice in 1946, Garton grew up in Ellis, and graduated from Beatrice High School in 1965. Less than a year later, he joined the United States Army when he was 19. After completing basic training in Missouri and automotive mechanic training in Virginia, he was flown coast to coast to Oakland, where he embarked a ship bound for Vietnam, sailing under the Golden Gate Bridge.

23 days later, he arrived, and by the end of 1966, the first of his two 11-month tours in Vietnam was underway.

"We went from Ft. Eustis on a C141 to San Francisco, Oakland - we were there three days," Garton recalled Tuesday. "Two guys went AWOL - they caught 'em downtown, put them on a ship, third hole down, clear from the front, for two weeks...they didn't go nowhere."

As a stevedore in Vietnam, Garton's duty was loading and unloading ships, and his crew would help transport damaged trucks to and from Okinawa for repair. His unit followed a bulldozer clearing the jungle to the Saigon River, where they frequently withstood incoming fire from Viet Cong troops, in the mornings Garton's squad would venture out to bury the bodies of all the deceased soldiers.

Garton returned home to Nebraska for good in September 1968. From there, he worked at Vise Grip in DeWitt for 29 years, handling the press and the electric shop. He then served with the Jefferson County highway department for 15 years, where he helped to clear the roads around Diller, where he now resides.