---

Second Baptist Church congregant Joe Sears will be among the nation’s veterans being honored during the Springwood Avenue house of worship’s Annual Veteran’s Breakfast, being held 8 a.m. Sunday.

The Vietnam War veteran served 11 years active duty and 12 years in the reserves, with additional tours throughout Germany, Belgium, England, France, and two years during the Cuban Crisis.

Sears [at right], 81, is an Alabama native and Tuskegee Institute graduate. Training brought the army engineer to Ft. Monmouth and his growing family kept him here.

“I knew that wherever I was stationed, I could [easily] get back to Fort Monmouth,” he said.

Sears said he also chose New Jersey because of the advantages in education and programs for his eldest, a daughter in need of special education. The 55-year-old now lives in a group home in Piscataway.  

And although he’s kept most of his service life to himself, he said the military saved his life.

“In retrospect the best thing that ever happened to me was the military,” Sears said. “When I finished Tuskegee with the obligation of going into the service, I had a year off. I had absolutely no idea of what to do with myself. I went back home briefly, thinking I would get a job but there were not many jobs for an engineer. So you might say I found myself in the service. I was able to focus on what it was I wanted to do.”

And while Sears went on to become a highly decorated lieutenant colonel, when he returned home from Vietnam, like most servicemen at the time, he was met with derision.

“We returned into San Francisco,” he said. “There were a lot of demonstrations and things going on against the Vietnam War. We had to change into civilian clothing to sneak into the country.”

Despite precautions, Sears recalls demonstrators flipping over and breaking the windows of a taxi cab he was traveling in shortly after his return.

“It was already hard coming back from war,” he said. “That was intense. You had to be in Vietnam and go through the things we were going through to understand it. But to go through the shunning. To come back to this country, my country, and have that done to you, it just leaves a bad memory in your mind.”

“I don’t talk about Vietnam because it brings back bad memories – all the people that were killed under my leadership,” Sears said. “I personally felt that we should not have been in Vietnam but that had no bearing on my oath to the country and to carry out what I was in the military to do.”

Sears reticence came from nation’s financial climate at the time.

“We were on the brink of a financial crisis, we had lots of problems with jobs, it was my belief that the reason we went into war was to overcome the recession and we did,” he said. “We didn’t really intend to win.”

Returning home, Sears also faced the racial struggles that existed before his deployments, some of them covert.

“We didn’t gain anything as a people,” he said. “We still had to go through the same struggles.”

Sears worked at Bell Labs for 20 years. He has been married to his wife Betty for 55 years and they have three adult children, ages 55, 53, and 50. He has been a congregant at Second Baptist Church for over 45 years, and serves as a trustee.

Having battled prostate cancer the 81-year-old said, “I’m thankful to God that I’m still above ground.”

The 8 a.m. Veteran’s Breakfast will be followed by a 10 a.m. Veterans Officiated Service. The breakfast is free to the public and all veterans from surrounding areas encouraged to attend.

Second Baptist is located at 124 Atkins Ave, next to Springwood Ave Park.

[Photos courtesy of Second Baptist Church. Feature photo includes left to right, Greg Perry, James Perry, Mack Owens, Dan Harris, James Robeson and Raymond Baity]

—————————————————————————————————–

Follow the Asbury Park Sun on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

The Asbury Park Sun is affiliated with the triCityNews newspaper.

---