Military service can change a person’s life forever.

In the case of United States Marine Corps veteran John Stedman, it opened up a whole new world.

“I would say to anyone that the four years I spent in the Marine Corps were the most formative, and probably had more to do with what little success I’ve enjoyed than anything else,” he said.

Stedman was born in 1947 and grew up in upstate New York, in an area of the Adirondack Mountains he called “a very poor neck of the woods.” His father worked as a lumberjack and his mother as a domestic worker; job options were few and opportunities for career growth, he said, were slim. Military service was an obvious route to take.

“That’s the way people got out of up where I was from, if you couldn’t afford college,” he said.

Stedman’s family had close ties with the military. His father had been in the Second Armored Division in Europe during World War II and had fought in the Battle of the Bulge. His mother had worked as a pharmacist’s mate in the WAVES. Many others in his community had served as well.

They didn’t talk much about their experiences, Stedman said, but as a youth he caught glimpses, such as finding his parents’ uniforms in their closet, seeing a school coach’s burn scars from a B-24 crash, and witnessing a high school teacher’s nervous behavior — behavior that, according to Stedman’s father, derived from flying missions in a B-17.

“I mean, just about every teacher I had had a story like that,” Stedman said.

But that didn’t deter Stedman from enlisting. He chose the Marines because he knew people who had served in that branch and was impressed by them — his Uncle Dan, for one. “I always liked Uncle Dan,” he said, “and I said, well, his uniform looked the best.”

After high school, Stedman went to boot camp at Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island in South Carolina. Training was, as expected, very strict, he said. However, having grown up in a large family and already worked for “a lot of hard men” — where “discipline was part of the act,” he said — he adjusted and even applied his high school education to helping other young men through training.

During boot camp, Stedman said he observed the Marine Corps’ “ability to evangelize” and its efforts to ensure that servicemen had access to spiritual resources. He remembers a time when a drill instructor, addressing Stedman’s platoon before church, ordered Protestants, Catholics, and Jews to come forward. Then the instructor counted off the men who hadn’t stepped forward and assigned each of them to one of those faith designations so that they attended services, too.

“In the Marine Corps there’s a saying: there’s no atheist in any foxhole…they recognize that if you don’t have any strong spiritual hold, you’re in trouble.”

When Stedman completed boot camp, he was assigned to be an aircraft hydraulics mechanic. For his training he first went to Naval Air Station Memphis and studied at the Naval Air Technical Training Center in Millington, Tennessee. This was followed by a year with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 461 (HMH-461) at Marine Corps Air Station New River in North Carolina, where he worked with the CH-53, the largest helicopter the U.S. military had.

“Once you worked on 53s, you could work on anything,” Stedman said.

After several months of factory training on the AH-1G Cobra helicopter at Bell in Fort Worth, Texas, Stedman received his orders for Vietnam. He was first assigned to Marine Observation Squadron 2 (VMO-2) at the Marble Mountain Air Facility in Da Nang. He then served as a door gunner on the UH-1E, or Huey gunship, with Marine Light Helicopter Squadron 167 (HML-167).

While in Vietnam, Stedman participated in Prairie Fire missions, in which teams were dropped into enemy zones to engage in reconnaissance. “They were probably some of the most exciting flying that you could possibly do in those days,” he said, “because we’d put those teams in and lots of times those teams would make contact with North Vietnamese troops, and we’d have to pull them out under fire.”

On one mission, he and his fellow crew members had to get their helicopter to a fire support base to refuel, as the low fuel light had been on too long, and rearm so they could get back to extract a team. On the way to the base, the pilot ordered the crew to throw out any loose cargo, such as empty ammo cans. He wasn't sure they would make the wire.

“It was so quiet,” Stedman recollected about the flight. “Nobody said anything. I’m sure that we were all praying.”

After almost a year in Vietnam, Stedman learned he was being transferred stateside to join Marine Helicopter Squadron One, or HMX-1 — the squadron in charge of the aircraft used by the President of the United States. He was pulled from flight duty in Vietnam a bit early because, as Stedman recalled being told, “they want to make sure you’re going to make it over there [to HMX-1].”

“It probably saved my life, because we were starting to lose crew after crew of a lot of the missions that we flew,” he said. “The North Vietnamese were starting to come down from up north and they were getting a lost smarter in how to handle us.”

At HMX-1 in Quantico, Virginia, Stedman applied his mechanical skills to working on the various aircraft the squadron kept. He recalled there being about 30 different aircraft, with the President flying in about a third of them. “Very interesting duty, as you can imagine,” he said.

One particularly interesting story he remembers was being invited, along with the rest of the squadron, to the White House by President Nixon for a Christmas party. “Most of us had not ever drank champagne…but after about three glasses of that, we were rocking and rolling,” he said.

After four years in the military, Stedman’s enlistment time was up. Stedman, now a corporal, decided not to continue on, as he and the girl he was dating, LaVonne, were serious and he didn’t want to run the risk of being transferred somewhere far away. He returned home to New York in the hopes of finding a job, but as it had been before, the possibilities there were few. Returning to Washington, D.C., he landed a job at Andrews Air Force Base, where we worked on “the ol’ man’s aircraft,” Air Force One.

Change in command and reduction in force in the 1970's led to Stedman looking for a job again. He got his associate’s degree in real estate management with the GI Bill and subsequently found his footing in the real estate field. In 1992, he and another veteran started their own business, Commission Express, which is still active today and has franchises across the country.

Stedman, now of Woodbridge, Virginia, is still close to the military. Living near Quantico, he returns to the base for squadron reunions and has gotten to know many people who have gone through there and have come to his church for worship. He also was able to combine his commitments to his faith and the armed forces by co-founding the Lutheran Military Support Group (LMSG). The contribution to LMSG that Stedman said he is “most proud of” is a campaign in which supporters can place their donations to the organization in a unique item: ammo cans. The very item Stedman and his crew had thrown out of their low-fuel helicopter in Vietnam decades ago.

After speaking with Stedman, it is clear he recognizes and appreciates the blessings that God, through his time in the military, has given him. He acknowledges divine intervention — in the form of his pastor's referral — for his “first big deal” in real estate, a career he may not have realized had he not enlisted as a teenager. Stedman, who was Methodist growing up, said he would not have met his wife LaVonne, whom he credits for leading him to become a Lutheran and assisting “a great deal in getting LMSG off the ground.”

“You can’t replace your time [in service],” he said.

To this day Stedman witnesses the military helping others who, like him, decided to join, and foresees many others accepting the call.

“I think it makes us a stronger nation,” he said.

Written by Jenni Mickelson, 2025