At the Veterans Breakfast Club,
Stories Unite Us.
Check out our online & in-person veterans storytelling programs and see our full event schedule below. All are welcome to join us!
Join us for a FREE VBC breakfast in Unity Township at the American Legion Post 982 (158 American Legion Rd, Latrobe, PA 15650) on July 15 at 8:30am. Please RSVP for this free breakfast event by calling 412-623-9029 or emailing betty@veteransbreakfastclub.org.
Everyone is welcome, veterans and non-veterans, and the breakfast will be provided for free.
We plan our usual fast-moving and wide-ranging program with lots of participation. We’ll have veterans of various ages and branches of service sharing their stories of service.
Breakfast is served at 8:30am. At 9:00am, we start the program. For the next 90 minutes, veterans share slices of their service experience. You never know what you’re going to hear, and there’s always new people with new memories to offer.
RSVP by calling 412-623-9029 or emailing betty@veteransbreakfastclub.org. Please make sure to RSVP for events at least two days in advance. We understand that your schedule can change quickly, but advance notice of attendance always helps us and our venues prepare the program. Thank you!
Please consider sponsoring this event!
Six Marines raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi on February 23, 1945, became one of the most enduring images in American history. But what about the company behind the flag?
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a conversation with Marine veteran and author Billy Myers, who has spent years researching the remarkable story of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion, 28th Marines—the unit whose men climbed Suribachi and whose members raised both the first and second flags over Iwo Jima.
Myers’ forthcoming book tells the story of Easy Company from its formation through the brutal battle for Iwo Jima and beyond. Drawing on letters, diaries, military records, and family accounts, he introduces the ordinary young Americans who became part of one of World War II’s most iconic moments. If Band of Brothers told the story of Easy Company in Europe, Myers aims to tell the story of Easy Company in the Pacific.
A Marine Corps veteran himself, Myers enlisted at seventeen and served four years before earning degrees from Northwestern State University and The Ohio State University. He later spent nearly three decades coaching football and baseball in Louisiana, bringing the same commitment to teamwork, leadership, and perseverance to his historical research.
Our conversation will explore not only the famous flag raising but also the men whose lives have too often been overshadowed by a single photograph. We’ll discuss the savage fighting on Iwo Jima, the bonds forged within Easy Company, the challenges of reconstructing its history eighty years later, and why these Marines still matter today.
As always, we’ll leave plenty of time for audience questions, comments, and stories. Veterans, family members, students, history lovers, and all who wish to learn are warmly welcome.
Did one decision in Washington change the course of the Vietnam War?
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a conversation with award-winning historian and former Los Angeles Times reporter Jack Cheevers about his powerful new book, Kennedy’s Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America’s Descent into Vietnam.
In November 1963, South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm was overthrown and assassinated by his own generals. For decades, historians have debated the extent of the Kennedy administration’s role in the coup and whether Diệm’s death made America’s deeper involvement in Vietnam inevitable. Drawing on a decade of research, eyewitness interviews, declassified documents, and dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, Cheevers reconstructs the political intrigue, personal rivalries, and fateful decisions that led to one of the most consequential turning points of the Cold War.
More than a political history, Kennedy’s Coup is a human drama populated by unforgettable characters: President John F. Kennedy and his divided advisers; Ambassador Frederick Nolting, who struggled to preserve the alliance with Diệm; the outspoken Madame Nhu; ambitious South Vietnamese generals plotting in secret; courageous American journalists reporting from Saigon; and CIA operatives caught between diplomacy and covert action. Cheevers argues that the coup—and Diệm’s murder—opened the door to nearly a decade of escalating American involvement in Vietnam.
Cheevers is the author of the award-winning Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo, recipient of the Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature. His meticulous research and compelling storytelling have made him one of today’s leading writers on American military and diplomatic history.
As always, we’ll leave plenty of time for audience questions, comments, and stories. Veterans, family members, students, and all who wish to learn are warmly welcome.
Greatest Generation Live welcomes one of the last surviving Canadian veterans of D-Day, Jim Parks, for a conversation about his extraordinary journey from Depression-era Winnipeg to the beaches of Normandy and the final victory over Nazi Germany.
Jim enlisted in the Canadian Army while still underage and spent nearly three years training in Britain before landing with the Royal Winnipeg Rifles on Juno Beach on June 6, 1944. Assigned to arrive just ahead of the main assault, his landing craft struck an obstacle and he was forced to swim ashore without his rifle. From that chaotic beginning, Jim fought through the brutal Normandy campaign at Putot and Carpiquet, crossed Belgium and the Netherlands, battled at the Leopold Canal and in the Rhineland, and finished the war in Germany as a sergeant.
Jim has a remarkable gift for storytelling. He vividly recalls the confusion and terror of the invasion, the comrades he lost, the small moments of humanity that sustained soldiers in combat, and the challenges of returning home after the war. His reflections remind us that history is made not only by armies and generals, but by ordinary young people asked to do extraordinary things.
Joining Glenn Flickinger as co-host is history teacher Scott Masters, who will help place Jim’s experiences in the broader story of Canada’s pivotal role on D-Day and the liberation of Northwest Europe. Together they will explore the campaign, Jim’s life before and after the war, and the importance of preserving these firsthand memories for future generations.
Bring your questions and join us for out conversation with someone who can tell us what it was like to come ashore on D-Day.
During the Vietnam War, amid the chaos of Saigon in 1968, a young American actor made an unusual decision. Rather than serve in the U.S. military, 24-year-old Pittsburgh native Richard Hughes traveled to Vietnam on his own, determined to find some way to help civilians caught in the conflict.
What he encountered were homeless street children—boys who survived by shining shoes for American GIs, sleeping in parks and alleys, and regularly being swept up by police. The Vietnamese called them bụi đời—“dust of life.” Hughes rented a modest apartment on Pham Ngu Lao Street and began offering the boys a place to sleep, shower, and eat. What started with eleven children soon grew into something far larger.
Over the next eight years, the Shoeshine Boys Project evolved into a Vietnamese-run network of homes in Saigon and Da Nang that provided shelter, schooling, and job training for hundreds of homeless children. By the end of the war in 1975, the project included eight homes, two farms, and a technical training center serving roughly 300 children at a time. Between 1968 and 1976, an estimated 1,500–2,000 boys and girls passed through the program.
The effort was remarkable not only for its scale but for its spirit. Hughes worked closely with Vietnamese students, teachers, and community leaders who ultimately took charge of the homes and helped return many children to their families and villages. Despite the upheaval of war and its aftermath, the project became one of the few successful Vietnamese-managed, foreign-funded humanitarian initiatives of the era.
Hughes remained in Vietnam for more than a year after the fall of Saigon, finally leaving in August 1976—likely among the last Americans to depart. In the decades since, he has continued to advocate for Vietnamese friends and colleagues, including a successful campaign in the 1990s to secure the release of two former project associates imprisoned in Vietnam. He has also remained involved in efforts to address the lingering human consequences of the war, including work related to Agent Orange.
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a special conversation with Dick Hughes as he reflects on the Shoeshine Boys Project, the children and Vietnamese colleagues who made it possible, and the complicated legacy of the Vietnam War. His story offers a rare civilian perspective from inside wartime Saigon—and a reminder that even in the midst of conflict, acts of compassion and solidarity can take root in unexpected ways.
As always, we welcome questions and reflections from veterans and others who served in or remember the Vietnam era.
The Holocaust did not begin with Auschwitz. Before the gas chambers became instruments of industrialized murder, mobile SS killing squads known as the Einsatzgruppen followed the German army into Eastern Europe, massacring more than a million Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners, and civilians in forests, ravines, villages, and fields.
After the war, a young American Army investigator named Benjamin “Ben” Ferencz uncovered the Nazis’ own meticulous records of these mass shootings. At just 27 years old—and having never argued a case in court—Ferencz was appointed Chief Prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg, where twenty-two SS commanders were charged with crimes against humanity in what newspapers called “the biggest murder trial in history.”
Join military historian Colin Heaton as he examines the history of the Einsatzgruppen, the evidence that exposed their crimes, and the landmark trial that helped establish modern international criminal law. Along the way, we’ll explore the remarkable life and legacy of Ben Ferencz, whose pursuit of justice shaped the postwar world and influenced generations of war crimes prosecutions.
