Brindley, Thomas Drew, 2ndLt

Thomas Drew Brindley was born in St. Paul and lived most of his life on the East Side. He attended Farnsworth Elementary School and Cleveland Junior High, where he and a friend used a manual printing press to make and sell business cards. As a teenager he pumped gas at his dad's Brindley Oil Co. station on Payne Ave., and bought himself a '57 Chevy convertible. He loved sports, and played football and hockey with his friends on the Phalen Youth Club teams. He made the varsity hockey team as a sophomore at Johnson High School and played defense in two state high school hockey tournaments. The offer of a hockey scholarship to Colorado College was accepted and he played for three years. Thomas throughly enjoyed his college time, becoming president of the local chapter of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity. But his interest in academic pursuits waned and he left Colorado to return to St. Paul in 1965. When the draft board classified him 1A, he joined the Marine Corps and was accepted into Officer Candidate School where he studied harder than ever. He remarked that if he had studied this hard while in college, he'd have been a straight-A student. In October of 1967 Thomas bid farewell to his parents, three brothers, his fiancee and friends as he boarded the flight to Vietnam. He was assigned to India Company in the 3rd Marine Division stationed near the DMZ. As a Second Lieutenant he led a platoon engaged in the hill battles against the army of North Vietnam. His efforts to rescue another platoon of Marines have been chronicled in several books about the siege of Khe Sanh. Within days, Thomas was killed in battle when his platoon reached the top of Hill 881 North, and he was awarded the Navy Cross for extraordinary heroism. He was 24 years old when he died on January 20, 1968. Greg Brindley, brother of Thomas Brindley From "The Faces Behind the Names," by Don Ward