With dying wish, Vietnam veteran receives diploma from North Central High School

In a back room of North Central High School on Wednesday, Steve Fisk gently draped a graduation gown over the hunched shoulders of 68-year-old Vietnam veteran Stephen Rieckers.

Then Rieckers rolled his electric wheelchair onto the stage of North Central’s auditorium to receive the diploma he never got.

“To me it’s a valuable thing, because it’s something I’ve been after for a long time,” he said.

Rieckers should have graduated in 1969. Instead, he dropped out of high school at the end of his junior year to escape an abusive step-father. He then enlisted in the military and served two tours in Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic.

The self-described troublemaker was on a first name basis with the North Central principal at the time. He had already run away from home before dropping out and spent the latter half of his junior year couch surfing. When the military offered a path forward, he quickly seized the opportunity.

“He shipped out to Vietnam, which was a pretty common senior trip for kids of that era,” said Fisk, the principal of North Central, during Wednesday’s graduation ceremony.

It wasn’t a pretty trip. Rieckers recalls watching tracer bullets arc up toward his helicopter, each one potentially deadly. He was shot down several times.

“I loved to fly in helicopters,” he said. “But the thing is, it’s a trigger now, we have helicopters that fly out here and my heart starts to beat a little bit.”

After his military service, he earned his GED and worked as a mechanic for numerous Spokane-area companies.

For years, Rieckers suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It went largely undiagnosed and unnoticed by doctors, he said. His wife, Susan, who Rieckers refers to as his “Domestic Goddess,” said she’d often find him awake early in the morning patrolling their home.

“I used to wake up in the middle of the night and pull guard duty,” Rieckers said.

His PTSD has gotten better in recent years, largely thanks to it being diagnosed and treated at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. However, his time in Vietnam has come back to haunt him in another way.

Marked to the bone

As a helicopter mechanic, Rieckers dropped soldiers off, or picked them up, from the jungles of Vietnam. Often, those areas had been heavily sprayed with Agent Orange, a defoliant. Rieckers remembers being coated in the stuff and feeling physically sick afterward.

Decades later, he was diagnosed with bone-marrow cancer. That type of cancer was linked in 2015 to exposure to Agent Orange.

Rieckers will die, although it’s not clear how soon, said his wife.

When he got the news, Rieckers started to think about his bucket list. It was short: Go fishing as much as possible, and get a diploma from North Central High School. He called the school and asked if it could be arranged.

Fisk said when he learned about Rieckers’ past, he thought it deserved more than just a diploma. He organized a small ceremony, attended by roughly 30 people, including Superintendent Shelley Redinger.

Susan Chapin, Spokane Public Schools board vice president, presented Rieckers his diploma.

“My brother has a very similar story,” she said while handing him the long-delayed certificate.

Washington State law allows school districts to grant diplomas to military veterans from World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Since the law was implemented in 2003, there have been roughly 10 such ceremonies in Spokane Public Schools, said Shawn Jordan, the district’s director of secondary education programs.

The attention and respect shown Wednesday brings Rieckers war experience full circle, Susan Rieckers said. When he returned from Vietnam, he was not treated well, she said. People would cross the street to avoid walking by him.

“The thing is, he was a 19-year-old kid,” she said. “These kids came back basically damaged men.”

Rieckers said when he first went to the VA after his service, they examined him briefly and said “you’re fine, get out of here.”

After receiving the diploma, Rieckers basked in a far different kind of attention while eating cake. About 10 current or former North Central students clustered around him in a semi-circle. Rieckers cracked jokes.

“I’m going to wait another 40 or so years and then get a college diploma,” he said.

Editor’s note: This story was changed on July 20, 2017. A previous version failed to identify Steve Fisk as the principal of North Central High School.