After 34 years, an ISU professor is getting the Medal of Valor he earned during his service in the Vietnam War.Kenneth Stone, professor of economics, was presented the Silver Star by Rep. Leonard Boswell, D-Iowa, Wednesday. More than 30 people attended the U.S. Army ceremony in a cramped Heady Hall room. “It feels good [to have the award],” Stone said. “I knew that I had it, but it’s partly my fault that I didn’t pursue it right away.”On April 1, 1967, Capt. Stone landed his helicopter in a field in Vietnam after he received a call from an infantry battalion in trouble, Boswell said.”Within minutes of the call, he was over the area,” he said. “With complete disregard of his personal safety, Stone hovered [and landed] the aircraft, despite possible groundfire and being low on fuel.”Boswell, who had also served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot, said Stone had shown “unquestionable valor in keeping with excellent military service,” during his two tours in Vietnam.”We’ve come here to honor Dr. Stone,” he said. “It makes me very appreciative and so pleased that we have the opportunity once and awhile to appreciate the people who serve our country.”Stone made the inquiry to Boswell’s office about his medal two years ago when they had handled a complaint he had about the Internal Revenue Service. They handled the case efficiently, and he said he was curious if the Boswell’s staff would be able handle the medal situation just as well.”I want to thank Boswell’s office,” he said. “His staff did a super job.”Research was done to find the missing papers that would have given Stone his medal long ago by the representative’s staff and Boswell said, “Sure enough, it had been overlooked.”Stone enlisted in the army in 1959 when he was 30 years old and started one-and-a-half years of flight training in Ft. Rucker, Ala. Afterwards, he moved to Ft. Wolters in Texas for helicopter training until he started his first tour in Vietnam from 1962-1963.When Stone came back to the states, he married his high school acquaintance, Jan, from Newton, Ill., in 1965. Less than two years later, Stone resumed his duties in Vietnam during his second tour of duty.During his second tour in Vietnam, Jan and Kenneth made sure to keep in contact with each other every week. “Once a week, he wrote letters to me,” said Jan, professor of textiles in clothing at Iowa State. “I kept them all in a box. I haven’t had the courage to open them up yet.”Stone said they also sent tape recordings back and forth, along with the letters. Together, the Stones’ plan on publishing their letters and recordings in a book sometime in the future.”I’ve opened the box once,” he said. “It brought back a lot of memories.”Stone returned home for good in 1967 and said he wanted to get settled into a job once he returned back to the U.S., but he also expressed a desire to resume his studies. He said he had graduated from the University of Illinois with a bachelor’s degree in agricultural engineering before starting his first tour in Vietnam.His plan, Stone said, was to go to night school at Texas Christian University and get his master’s in management sciences while he was in the Army Reserves in Texas, where he was promoted to colonel. After TCU, Stone returned to the University of Illinois to receive his doctorate’s degree in agricultural economics in 1976. Immediately after graduation, he came to Iowa State, he said, and he has been here ever since. In 1998, Stone decided to revisit Vietnam with his wife and two grown children, Eric and James. He said everything in the country had changed since the 1960s.”I was disappointed that landmarks that I had looked for were not there anymore,” he said.Jan said the trip was an impressionable experience for her because “people came home [to the U.S.] to forget; the sooner we could forget about it the better.”Despite her wish to ignore the events of the war, Jan said it is important for people to remember and understand what happened in that country and the horrors that occurred.”Young people here and there — in Vietnam — have no clue about the war,” she said, as a single tear rolled down her cheek.