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Virginia College News
Virginia College Employees, Former Marines, Have Impromptu Reunion Forty Years Later
Posted: Friday, September 4, 2009
Thirty-nine years ago, at a remote combat support base in Viet Nam, two young Marines were fighting a tough war, but doing what their nation called upon them to do. Now, forty years later, these same two experienced a coincidental reunion while working for Virginia College. Lewis Richards and Ray Dunsmore are not sure if they actually met each other back then, but they were both assigned to a small, remote base at the same time in 1969 and 1970, during the Viet Nam War. They are certain their paths would have first crossed there.
Sergeant Lewis Richards was with a supply company that supported Marines operating out of An Hoa, a fire support base in western Viet Nam. Captain Ray Dunsmore was an Infantry Platoon Commander, in charge of fifty combat Marines operating in the treacherous hills and jungle around An Hoa.
Fast forward to August 25, 2009. Ray Dunsmore was working in the library at the Virginia College School of Business and Health location in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was assisting a student with preparing her resume and had his laptop computer open. On the cover of that laptop was a U.S. Marine Corps emblem.
From across the room, Lewis Richards was teaching one of his Cosmetology classes. Richards glanced across the library and spotted that Marine logo on Dunsmore's computer. When he had the chance, Richards walked over and asked Dunsmore if he was a Marine and shared that he had been a member of the Corps as well. As they discussed their pasts and Marine experiences, they discovered that they had both served their country--in the same place at the same time--a half a world away.
Since that chance meeting, the two men have gotten together several times to discuss their days in the Corps and to talk about how the training, discipline and their combat experiences have had a profound effect on their lives, including in their careers at Virginia College.
Richards has been an instructor with Virginia College for the past eighteen months and is also a licensed Cosmetologist. He owns and operates The Expozure Hair Concepts in Chattanooga. Dunsmore works with Virginia College's corporate ownership, Education Corporation of America, in Campus Support, assisting multiple campuses as part of the schools' Career Services Department.
