KEN HRUBY • VIETNAM WAR
Ken Hruby, 86
Gloucester, MA
Born: 12/4/1938
Born/Raised: Ft. Mead, SD/Military
Service: US Army Ranger
Unit: Various
Rank: Lt. Colonel
Dates of Service: 1957-1982
Ken Hruby was raised in the military by his mother Evelyn Mae Byers and father, Lt. Colonel Joe Hruby. By the time he was gearing up for college, he’d already lived on several bases, including Fort Omaha during WWII and in Yokohama, Japan in 1946 after the conclusion of World War II. “I got two letters (in 1957), one offer from Harvard and the other an appointment to West Point. I didn’t know anything about the Ivy League, so I went to West Point.” Given the history of his family, the decision isn’t all that surprising: his brother Dale preceded him at the esteemed Army college.
Upon graduation in 1961 as a 2nd Lieutenant, he jumped right into Airborne and Army Ranger school. His first posting would be for 18 months along the DMZ in Korea with the 1st Cavalry dealing mostly with landmines, defectors and spies. Following this assignment, he was sent to the Fort Bragg Language School in Monterey, CA, to learn Vietnamese in readiness for his next assignment. While there, he met a “nice Gloucester girl,” Billie Jensen, whose mother had sent her to Monterey to “meet a husband.” Dinner and six weeks later they would be married. Nine days after that, Ken was on a plane to Vietnam. During his deployment, Billie joined Ken in Saigon and up-country for a six-day reunion.
He would spend most of 1963 and ’64 as an advisor to infantry and Ranger battalions of the SVA (South Vietnamese Army) providing air and artillery support and resupply missions. Most of the SVA officers he worked with had been in the French Foreign Legion, so they spoke French with each other. Twelve days short of the end of his tour there, he contracted hepatitis, malaria and dysentery and would spend eight months in hospitals in the Philippines, Hawaii and the Chelsea Navy Hospital to recover.
His career took him to Fort Lewis, in Washington, Fort Benning (now Moore) in Georgia where he taught machine gunnery, and once again back to Korea as a Protocol Officer for the United Nations Command and back on the DMZ as an Infantry Battalion XO. 1969 found him at the University of Georgia getting his MBA in Data Processing and a PhD (ABD) in Organization Behavior; Fort Hood, TX in 1971; the Leavenworth Command Staff College; Headquarters Commandant of XVIII Airborne Corps (Mayor) and his terminal assignment to Belgium assigned to SHAPE (NATO). Ken retired from the Army in 1982 as a Lt. Col. and the Hruby family moved back to Gloucester. Billie became a nutrition counselor and owned and operated the Diet Center for over a decade.
Along the way, he and Billie had three children, Melissa Paladino, Amanda Waters and KC Hruby and, in turn, six grandchildren. Ken attended the Museum School to study sculpture and became an artist and a teacher. He was one of the founding members of the Boston Sculptors Gallery. After 60 years of marriage Billie died in 2023.