A Memorial Day Tribute

A Memorial Day Tribute

Two San Marcos Student Body Presidents 
Two Casualties of the Vietnam War

By Glenn Hunter | May 23, 2024

In San Marcos High School’s 1963 yearbook, there’s a photo of 26 young men standing ramrod straight, hair close-cropped, all neatly dressed, mostly in suits and jackets, looking like they just stepped out of the television series Mad Men. These were the “key boys,” members of a student organization called the Key Club who took on leadership roles, volunteering for all sorts of school projects, from selling football programs to repainting the parking lot.

It’s a formal photograph, one we’ll never see again — and a poignant one, taken in that moment before the storm of cataclysmic change that was about to engulf the nation. In mid-1963, when this photo appeared in the yearbook, President John F. Kennedy was still alive, and U.S. military involvement in Vietnam had barely registered in the nation’s consciousness. 

By the end of that year, however, Kennedy had been assassinated, and by summer of 1964, the war had exploded into the Gulf of Tonkin, changing the lives of these 26 young men forever. They now were faced with dramatic decisions. How would they respond to the draft? Would they willingly enlist in the military? Would they try to get a deferment? Or would they just roll the dice and see what fate awaited them?

In the case of two Key Club members, Jerry Georges and Ray Bretches, we know their fate. Both would be killed in Vietnam — within a year of each other.

The backgrounds of Raymond Dean Bretches and Jerry Harold Georges followed remarkably similar arcs. Georges and Bretches had each been president of their junior high school student body; both were standout athletes; both had been elected president of the San Marcos High School student body. And each had enlisted voluntarily in the U.S. military: one in the Army, one in the Marine Corps. 

Though not close friends, they were friends, nonetheless. As Ray’s brother Garry described it, “They recognized each other in each other.” 

Home Fires

By the time I was a San Marcos senior in 1967, editing the sports section of the school paper, both of those young men had already graduated: Bretches in 1963, and Georges in 1964. My older brother, Randy, though, had been in Jerry’s class and would serve in Vietnam as a U.S. Army journalist. Recently, he asked me if the school paper had written about Jerry’s death back in 1967. I had to admit I couldn’t remember anything about it. And I couldn’t help feeling guilty about that.

During World War II, our father had served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific, and our mother had worked in a Santa Barbara aircraft plant. I suppose we were a patriotic family growing up, but for most of the 1960s, I don’t recall much discussion or any strong feelings expressed in our family about Vietnam. 

I had been lucky enough to be classified 1-Y by the Selective Service System, which meant I would only be mustered into the military as a last, desperate measure. But Randy had enlisted in the Army. That changed things at home. 

The morning in January ’67 when Randy was to report for boot camp at a government facility in Los Angeles, the whole family, excluding a sister, was up before dawn to take him down south. Dad drove the Chevy station wagon, Mom was in the front seat, and Randy sat in back with me. He slept for much of the trip, which seemed to irritate Mom. “If we’d known you were going to sleep, we could have just put you on a bus,” she said, trying to keep up a cheerful, teasing atmosphere, but we were all worried about him.

Randy came back from the Vietnam War alive. But today, the names of Ray Bretches and Jerry Georges are among those inscribed on a memorial at San Marcos High School honoring local men who were killed in the war. In all, more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives in Vietnam, including 98 from Santa Barbara County.

So, telling the stories of Bretches and Georges during this Memorial Day holiday seemed fitting — and the least I thought I could do to honor those who’d patriotically answered their country’s call and given everything they had.

A Peaceful Warrior 

Ray was the oldest of six boys, born in Los Angeles County in 1945 to Alice and Bill Bretches. The family moved to Santa Barbara in 1951, and Ray attended Harding Elementary School and then La Cumbre Junior High, where he was president of its student body. At San Marcos, he joined the Key Club all three years and was elected student body president for 1962-63. 

“He was one of the kindest, most considerate, most compassionate people I ever met,” his brother Garry remembered. Also a San Marcos alum, Garry had managed Ray’s campaign for student body president and said, “People loved his sincerity. He had a sense of humor but was not a class clown. His leadership was a reflection of his values. Ray was an open book, and people could see that.”

Ray Bretches also was an outstanding athlete. Strong and compact — a News-Press sports story listed him at 5″4’and 170 pounds — he played fullback on the San Marcos Royals varsity football team. He also played baseball all three years and, as a senior, was teammates with Georges on the varsity baseball squad.

After graduating from high school in 1963, Ray had an athletic scholarship to attend Utah’s Brigham Young University (the Bretches family were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints). But a football injury Ray had suffered at San Marcos prevented him from competing at Brigham Young. Disappointed, he left Utah after a year, returned to Santa Barbara, and in 1965 signed up to join the Army. During World War II, the Bretches’ father had also been in the Army, experiencing combat in New Guinea.

“As an enlisted soldier, Ray went through everything: jump school, officer candidate school, Green Beret school, and Ranger training. He was driven to be the best at whatever he was doing,” Garry said, and Ray pursued his military goals for two reasons, according to his brother: “Because anything he did, he wanted to go all the way. And because he was against the war and he wanted to find out for himself what was going on, and then come back and work for peace. His goal was to come back as a Green Beret officer, and then nobody could call him a sissy, anti-war commie. He wanted to stand up there with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and talk against the war with his Green Beret on.”

In fact, Garry added, the entire Bretches family opposed the war from the beginning.

Mr. Typical Teen

Jerry too was a child of the baby boom — born in Santa Barbara in 1946 to Helen and Harold Georges, the oldest of four children. A Catholic family, they attended church at Saint Rafael’s. Jerry went to Goleta Union Elementary School and then to Santa Barbara and La Colina junior high schools. At the latter, he was crowned Conquistador, named Typical Teenager, and served as president of the student body, displaying the leadership traits he would continue to have at San Marcos High.

Georges’s sister, Cindy “Itoo” Georges-Burwell, remembers her brother as always focused on helping others. “He would take everybody’s troubles on and try to help them,” she said. “He would come home and sleep for hours, like he had the world on his shoulders. He had such a charisma; people were just drawn to him.” 

At San Marcos, Georges became president of his sophomore class and, in his senior year, student body president. Like Bretches, he was a member of the Key Club all three years — serving during his junior year as vice president — and an excellent athlete. He played “C” basketball two years,
baseball all three years — including on that 1962-63 varsity squad with Ray — and made the 1963-64 varsity football team. That same school year, Georges also was named the class’s Best Leader, as well as Mr. Typical Teen. 

April Fiur, who knew Georges in 1965, wrote about him on a memorial website in 2015. “I remember how self-assured and confident he seemed, but not in a cocky, arrogant way. He was always a gentleman, and just had a presence that made you want to listen to what he had to say.”

Following high school graduation, Georges attended Santa Barbara City College for a year, lettering in football and baseball, before enlisting in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1965.

Jerry’s father also had been in the Marine Corps, serving in the South Pacific during World War II.

“Jerry was gung-ho — ‘I’m gonna save the country,’ ” his sister Cindy recalled. “Because my dad was a Marine, too, it was just an unquestioning thing. It was the right thing to do. You went, and you did it.” 

Death near the DMZ

In May 1966, Georges was sent to South Vietnam. Ten months later, as a rifleman with Bravo Company, First Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment, Third Marine Division, the 20-year-old corporal was assigned to a mission near Con Thien, just below the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) separating North and South Vietnam. 

A squad leader, Georges had insisted on staying on the front lines, even though he was eligible to be rotated to a safer position in the rear, recalled his friend Tom Cherry. Cherry, a member of Georges’s eight-man squad, also was eligible to be sent to the rear, but he declined. “We were gung-ho Marines,” said Cherry, now 76. “We spent a lot of time in foxholes together. Jerry was an awesome leader.”

During Operation Beacon Hill in March 1967, Georges and his squad were involved in intense fighting against Viet Cong guerillas east of Con Thien. Such operations were especially tough, Cherry said, because the enemy would burrow into “spider holes” in the ground, then cover the holes with grass or leaves in order to hide. “When the Marines went by, they’d pop up out of the hole and machine-gun them.”

During the fighting, two Marines were killed in this kind of ambush, and one of them was Jerry Georges. Three other Marines in Jerry’s squad were wounded. Another former Marine, Bill Nimmo, who was in the same operation in another squad that day just behind Georges and Cherry, recalled how word soon spread back through the line that Jerry had been hit.

The medevac choppers were called in quickly, and Cherry carried Jerry to the chopper. “He was still alive when I put him in,” Cherry said. “We’d made a deal with each other: If he got killed, I’d take his St. Christopher to his sister. And I said, ‘If I die, give my parents a watch or something.’ ”

Georges died of his wounds at the Naval Hospital in Da Nang a couple of days later. 

After returning to the States, Cherry traveled to Santa Barbara and fulfilled his promise to his friend. 

Visiting Georges’s parents in their house on Venado Drive, he handed the St. Christopher medallion to Jerry’s mother, Helen Georges, an unacknowledged elder of the Chumash Nation, to give to her daughter. Today, Cindy Georges-Burwell still wears the medallion in a medicine pouch around her neck, along with Jerry’s Marine Corps dog tags.

“To keep him close,” she says.

A Booby-Trap Death

About nine months after Jerry’s death, Bretches was on a Special Forces patrol west of Dak To in Vietnam’s Central Highlands with a platoon of Montagnards — an indigenous hill people who supported the U.S. forces during the war. 

Then 22 years old and a First Lieutenant with the Army’s Company B, Fifth Special Forces Group, Bretches and the men in his unit were trying to find an enemy mortar position that for several days had been shelling the Special Forces camp at Ben Het, not far from the border with Laos and Cambodia.

“Near Hill 990, Raymond went forward to the point element to make a map and compass check and tripped a grenade booby trap,” according to an account of that day posted online in 2005 by Art Brandon, another member of Bretches’s Special Forces unit. It recorded that Bretches was killed instantly and did not suffer.

“He was a very courageous man and we were friends. I was a medic and tried CPR, but he was gone too fast. I carried him to the helicopter for evacuation,” Brandon wrote. “I think about him frequently and I’m positive that he is still missed.” Brandon passed away last August.

Bretches’s brother, Garry, said he’s convinced that both Ray and Jerry would have been significant figures in Santa Barbara — perhaps the city’s mayors — had they lived. “A couple of my brothers said, ‘What a waste, that Ray went over there and was killed,’ ” Garry said. “But as time passed, I understood it in a different way. 

“Part of his legacy on a bigger scale was that, yeah, he didn’t get to come back and stand on stage and campaign,” Bretches continued. “But his death — along with Jerry’s — made such a statement in the community of Santa Barbara. 

“My God, we lost these two amazing members of our community — these young leaders who would have been here to help advance our community — we lost them to this stinking war. And I think that helped people understand the full tragedy of that war.”

Bretches is buried at Santa Barbara Cemetery, and Georges is buried at Calvary Cemetery. Both had been awarded Purple Hearts. This year marks what would have been Georges’s 60th class reunion at San Marcos. Last year would have been Bretches’s 60th.

‘What Else Is There?’

In the mid-1970s, my brother and I had a friend in Santa Barbara named Dave Beyerlein, a Marine Randy had met in Vietnam. Dave was hardworking and even-keeled, with a quick wit. He studied at Santa Barbara’s Brooks Institute of Photography and later worked as a cameraman for KEYT-TV. He had returned to the States from Vietnam, settling in Santa Barbara and bringing with him a hard-earned attitude to war and peace. 

Only in researching this story about Ray and Jerry, however, did I discover to my surprise that just a few years before I met Dave, he had been one of the Marine Corps’ famous “Walking Dead” in Vietnam — a combatant in a notoriously bloody battle in February 1969 in the A Shau Valley near the border with Laos. 

During that horrendous firefight, a depleted company of 100 Marines, including then-Sergeant Beyerlein, fought back valiantly against an entrenched enemy force even after their Marine officers had been killed or were dying all around them. Dave, who was wounded during the battle, was awarded a Purple Heart, and a Silver Star for conspicuous gallantry in action.

Back in Santa Barbara 12 months later, he and a friend found themselves on an apartment balcony in Isla Vista one night, drinking beer and watching as a group of protesters marched in the street below. This was not uncommon in I.V. during the war. In 1970, the community was the site of one of the most iconic moments of the anti-war protests, the burning of the Bank of America. But that was later. On this night, as the two men sat watching the protesters march below, Beyerlein’s buddy said with disgust, “Look at those hippies shouting ‘Peace!’ ”

Dave’s response had a different tone — almost like a prayer. 

“Peace,” he said quietly. “What else is there?”