The Veterans Breakfast Club (VBC) is the nation’s premier non-profit for connecting veterans with their fellow Americans through inspiring stories of service. We’re the place where veterans can share what they’ve seen and done—and where everyone can listen and learn.
UPCOMING EVENTS
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.
In August 1969, nearly half a million Americans gathered at a farm in Upstate New York for what would become a defining moment of a generation: the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival. But Woodstock wasn’t really about music. In large part, it was about war. And the soundtrack it produced revealed the nation’s fault lines of protest, patriotism, grief, and defiance.
Join the Veterans Breakfast Club as we return to one of our most popular conversations: the music of the Vietnam War era. This time, we mark the 57th anniversary of Woodstock and add some new voices.
We’ll be joined by longtime VBC favorites Doug Bradley, Donn Nemchick, and Shaun Hall, along with two special guests who bring fresh perspective:
- Ron Farina, a U.S. Marine who lived the war these songs were trying to make sense of
- Mary Ellen Junda, a nationally recognized music historian, conductor, and educator whose work explores how song expresses social consciousness and binds communities together
Dr. Junda’s scholarship focuses on how music helps us process social change and conflict. She studies folk traditions and how music shapes as much as it represents the age.
We’ll talk about what troops in Vietnam actually listened to and what they knew about the changing music scene back home. We’ll also talk about Woodstock and what it meant.
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The Veterans Breakfast Club (VBC) is the nation’s premier non-profit for connecting veterans with their fellow Americans through inspiring stories of service.
Our goal is to build a nation that understands and values the experiences of our military veterans so that every day is Veterans Day.
We do this by bringing together–in-person and online–men and women from all walks of life, all ages and eras, and every branch of service to talk about what they’ve seen and done. We want to hear how people’s military service has shaped them. “Every Veteran Has a Story” is our slogan. We want to hear every one.
We share the stories we hear in our weekly VBC Bulletin email newsletter and our quarterly VBC Magazine. We also record a weekly podcast, The Scuttlebutt, about military culture from the people who lived it.
We do all this because we believe the best way to thank a Veteran is to listen.
Listening is what the VBC has been doing for the past 15 years, when we held our first small event outside of Pittsburgh. Since then, we’ve held over 1,000 programs in-person and online and have welcomed over 20,000 different people at our events, Veterans and non-Veterans coming together to listen.
We value every veteran’s experience, no matter who they are or when or how they served. We’ve seen up close the power of storytelling, as the memories shared at VBC events connect, heal, educate, and inspire an ever-expanding circle of listeners.
THE VETERANS HISTORY PROJECT
Preserving veterans’ stories so that this living history is never forgotten.
We pair passionate VBC volunteers with military veterans for one-on-one oral history interviews over Zoom. If you are a veteran, or you know a veteran, who would be interested in sharing his or her story with us, let us know. If you are someone interested in conducting these interviews, please reach out!
At any given event, you might hear from the newest members of Space Force to a 101-year-old World War II veteran.
We’ve welcomed Tin Can Sailors and Montford Point Marines, Vietnam Sky Soldiers and Cold War intelligence officers. We’ve heard stories from the Horn of Africa to Antarctica, the Bering Sea to Diego Garcia, and all points in between.
LORAN Coast Guardsmen and Radar Station Airmen have told us about serving in some of the most remote places on earth.
Korean War veterans have borne witness to their “forgotten war.”
Other “forgotten warriors” shared their memories of Beirut, Grenada, and Mogadishu.
Some of the first women authorized for combat shared stories of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the Purple Hearts they received.
