Rance Hendrix Rountree

West Point, 1965

Be Thou At Peace

Posted by e t newton on February 1, 2015:

Rance & I grew up in a small town in Georgia, grades 1 thru 9. His family moved away when his dad took a new job in another bank, in a similar sized town not far away but nearer Atlanta. We played sports: football (state champs his last year - 9th grade) and basketball, and he was better than most of us. He had a dream job for a kid in those days - at the local movie theater. He had a younger brother & sister (Corley & Rhonda), and they lived next door to the Hendrix family (note Rance's middle name). Always a good student, with a keen interest in civil war history, he knew at an early age that he wanted to have a military career. We would often be bored during math class, and would sit in the back row of the classroom and play a civil war game that he invented. My memory is that he always won, but I always suspected that it was at least partly due to the fact that he made the rules! I saw Rance a few times after he left, when he would visit "our" hometown, and remember that he first attended North Georgia College before getting his appointment to West Point. After that, the last thing I heard about Rance was that he had been selected from among his fellow cadets to interview the President at the white house. So for all these years I have assumed that he had a superlative record as a cadet - and I would have expected nothing less. He was one of my best friends during those early years. I ended up in the Air Force after college as a reserve officer, and another of our buddies became an Air Force pilot who was killed over North Vietnam. Over the years I wondered about my friend Rance, and regret that I did not discover this web site until nearly 1-yr after his death. The years go by, and we so often miss opportunities to share memories with those who have been a part of our lives. He was a good friend, and I will always miss him.

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