When a St. Joseph, Missouri, high school English teacher, Joy Vandel, began sharing the stories of Medal of Honor Recipients in 2017, she never imagined how her coursework would radiate out of her classroom.

But her Central High School sophomores took the lessons of sacrifice, integrity, patriotism, citizenship, commitment, and courage home with them, and the students began asking what their relatives did during America’s wars.

“Most veterans don’t talk about their time in battle. It’s just not something that they — that I’ve learned — that they openly share,” Vandel said. “War is not good. It’s hard. Doing these lessons sparked that curiosity and got them to reaching out to those older relatives that were veterans.”

Soon, parents began stopping Vandel outside school: “My daughter won’t stop talking about this stuff that she’s learning in your class,” and “She started to ask my dad all about this time in Vietnam.”  

“I learned so much in that first year of teaching with the program,” Vandel said. “I was learning right along with the kids. My grandfathers and uncles served, my grandfather served in World War II; but like most kids, I never talked to them about it.”

It all started in late 2017, when Joy joined her husband, musician Phil Vandel, at a gala inside the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to celebrate military service. It featured several Medal of Honor Recipients, and the gathering’s theme centered on education.

That’s how she learned about the Medal of Honor Foundation’s Character Development Program. The nonprofit offers a free and flexible curriculum created by teachers for teachers helming public, private, charter and homeschool classrooms nationwide.

According to the recent Medal of Honor Values Poll, conducted by Ipsos, 77% of Americans said they want an organization to create programs and communicate about the importance of the values of courage, sacrifice, patriotism, citizenship, integrity and commitment. 

The Medal of Honor Foundation aimed to expand the Character Development Program to answer that call. 

Back home in Missouri, Joy Vandel received from the Medal of Honor Foundation a disk drive shaped like a golden key. She plugged it into her computer and unlocked activities, worksheets, webinars, and a vast archive of historical information designed to bring to life the service and sacrifice of American military members who had received the nation’s highest award for battlefield courage.

“The way that the program is built, it’s great how it can really be incorporated into every subject,” Vandel said.

She assigned each student a war hero to study. What began with simple classroom presentations about what the kids had learned turned into a wider project, with sophomores writing to Medal of Honor Recipients or, in some cases, the families of Recipients who had passed away.

“The first year that we did that, it was incredible because we got so many responses from Recipients and the families,” Vandel said.

She collected letters, cards, autographed books and challenge coins. Vandel said Ruby Lucas — the wife of Jacklyn H. A Lucas, who passed away in 2008 — sent the students little vials of volcanic ash from Iwo Jima’s Red Beach One.

On Feb. 20, 1945, on the volcanic island of Iwo Jima, Pfc. Lucas and three of his fellow Marines assigned to Company C, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines, stumbled into an ambush set by a Japanese patrol. They hurled grenades at the Americans. Lucas threw his body in front of the explosives, absorbing the blasts to spare his fellow Marines, who charged and routed the soldiers.

Vandel said that the lessons first instilled a knowledge of the Medal and the magnitude of it, and as the students would dive into the stories and the citations of the individually awarded Medals, it “just kind of grew from there.”

Then the learning turned from studying these heroes and writing to them to meeting them face-to-face.

In early 2019, a pair of Medal of Honor Recipients visited Vandel’s students at Central High.  The kids didn’t know they were coming, but they knew a lot about Leroy A. Petry and Gary L. Littrell.

Petry medically retired from the Army in 2014 as a master sergeant after he’d survived eight combat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Petry received the Medal of Honor for flinging himself into a ferocious firefight against the Taliban to save his fellow soldiers.  

Littrell, a retired Army command sergeant major, received the Medal of Honor for bravely aiding a besieged South Vietnamese battalion through five days of brutal battle in 1970. According to the award’s citation, Littrell exhibited “near superhuman endurance” during the relentless combat.

Musician Phil Vandel called the arrival of both Recipients to visit the students at St. Joseph a “historic moment.”

Joy Vandel later departed Central for Smithville High, bringing the Character Development Program with her. Over the years, it’s inspired several of her students to enlist in the armed forces, but she never intended it to be a recruiting initiative. She thought it was an honor to share the stories of America’s brave troops with “anyone who’s willing to listen.”

“It’s something I’m really passionate about and have become really passionate about the more I use the program,” she continued. “And I think that that passion shows and gets people more on board with it. The kids get more excited about it because they see how passionate I am. It’s something I won’t stop using. I’m excited to see where the program goes over the next several years. Every year it seems they add more things. It’s just really kind of neat to have watched it grow from what it was when I first learned about it to what it is now. It’s still the same grassroots stuff that the kids just don’t get everywhere.”

While once only accessible with a golden key thumb drive like Vandel received, all of the lessons and videos of the program can now be accessed online. New users can create a free account, browse the lessons and save their favorites to their dashboard. Visit cmohs.org/lessons/overview.

Written by Noelle Wiehe: Noelle Wiehe is an award-winning journalist from Cincinnati, Ohio. She has covered several Army units and deployed as an active-duty Army soldier, in support of Operation Inherent Resolve to Kuwait. As a Military Veterans in Journalism fellow, she reported on every branch of the military as well as the first responder community for Coffee or Die Magazine. Today, she continues to serve through her work with Military Veterans in Journalism and as a military beat freelance writer while residing in Lafayette, Louisiana.