Vietnam casts 50-year shadow on vets

Decades after their service, South Dakotans face twilight years shaped by war’s lasting toll — and the quiet honor of remembrance at Veterans Cemetery

Ed Sandau and Curtis Hepner

Call it their twilight.

Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War, thousands of South Dakota veterans dispatched to save democracy are in the twilight of their lives — lives that took so many, so young, to the other side of the world in the 1960s and 1970s.

Ed Sandau is 69 now. Curtis Hepner is 78. Melvin Breitag is 82.

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