Billy Junior Chance

West Point, 1955

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by Russ Parsons on April 3, 2009:

Billy grew up in the small town of Mt. Hope in central Kansas. I grew up about 15 miles away in the small town of Halstead. Actually, Halstead was a big city compared to Mt. Hope--we had about 1,000 citizens--people from Mt. Hope would come to Halstead on Saturday night to mingle with the crowds and see the bright lights. Mt. Hope was so small they didn't have enough students in the high school to field a standard football team so they played 6-man football with a bunch of other small towns in the area. The undisputed star of the Mt. Hope team was Billy Chance. He was so good, so tough, so unstoppable he was known far and wide as a great football player even though most people didn't really care anything about 6-man football. Billy and I both got our appointments to West Point from Congressman Ed Rees, 4th District of Kansas. We knew each other slightly and got together at Fort Leavenworth when we took the entrance exams. We decided if we both passed we would travel to West Point together--and that's the way it turned out. Come the big day, our families took us to Newton, the county seat, to catch a train on The Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe railway to New York. This was a long journey in those days (1951)--we were on the train for it seems like two or three days--and then we arrived in Grand Central Station. Now remember, this was in the days before the Internet or even widespread availability of television, so to us New York was as exotic and mysterious a place as Oz was to Dorothy. To call us Greenhorns would be a compliment--we were, plain and simple, a couple of country bumpkins. How we ever got from Grand Central Station to the Weehawken Ferry to get to New Jersey and catch the train to West Point I'll never know. I know we spent a lot of time looking up at the impossibly tall buildings, and I'm pretty sure we got driven in circles by a sharp cab driver, but somehow we made it. Culture shock was not the only surprise that we got that day. It seems hard to believe, since Billy and I both had read a lot about West Point, but neither one of us knew or understood what the life of a plebe was like. We really didn't know about "bracing" or squaring corners or reciting 4th Class "poop" or anything. It came as a total shock to us the first time we were told to "squeeze your neck in, dumbsmack". Unfortunately, our natural reaction was to look at each other and grin--this was a big mistake! I only saw Billy on occasion after that. He played on the Army football team--I remember him recovering a crucial fumble at Michie Stadium one time. After graduation, I didn't see him for years at a time. I know he was one of a brave handful of Special Forces types who went into Laos (before we got involved in Vietnam) to train the natives to resist the Communists. They went in there wearing civilian clothes with the understanding that if they were captured the U.S. would disavow any knowledge of their actions and they would be on their own. I believe he had more than one of these tours and he never talked about it. Billy and the other guys that did that sort of work had real guts and they never got any credit or reward for it. There's no doubt that Billy and I started off as a couple of rubes from the sticks, but I think we did OK. The Army and the country got their money's worth out of us. I never met a better man or a finer soldier than Billy Chance.

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