Long, long ago and far, far away, America went to war and called its young men to battle. Millions answered, but nearly 60,000 never returned, hundreds of thousands suffered life-changing physical and mental injuries, and all were changed forever. One was former Rep. Stevan Pearce (R-NM), whom President Donald Trump nominated to serve as director of the Bureau of Land Management, and who honored those veterans with his second, just-released, book, You Had a Good Home, But You Left….
Born a sharecropper’s son in north Texas, Pearce was raised on a five-acre farm in Nadine, south of Hobbs, New Mexico (“It’s not ‘new’ and it’s not Mexico,” quips Pearce), west of the Texas Panhandle. Up to work on a neighbor’s farm at 4:30 a.m. at the age of 9, Pearce played baseball, raised livestock for 4-H, for which, with his ever-supportive mother’s assistance, he got a bank loan at 13, and battled his childhood fears: of public speaking, flying, and going to war.
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In 1969, while at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, his draft board ordered him to report for induction. Instead, as part of the school’s ROTC program, Pearce inquired about positions in the military, only to learn the sole opening was for pilots, “Because so many are dying.” Pearce had to overcome both his fear of flying and of going to war; he was headed for both.
Pearce’s grit, love of learning, faith, and perseverance got him through flight school training as a C-130 pilot and years of deployments in hostile skies above and landings in Vietnam, where he flew over 500 combat hours and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other medals and honors. Home in Hobbs, he married the love of his life, Cynthia, and together they built a successful business servicing the Permian Basin’s oil patch. Elected twice as a representative in the New Mexico State Legislature, he then served for a decade and a half, with a two-year break, as representative from the Second Congressional District, which, larger than 31 states, spans the southern half of New Mexico.
In Washington, Pearce battled federal overreach that threatened the livelihoods of farmers, ranchers, and energy workers across his district’s rural, wide-open spaces, especially in counties where most of the land is federally owned; sought to secure the nation’s southern border, which ran through nearly half of his district; and championed the needs of poor and Native American communities. Mostly, however, because of his service in Vietnam, his encounters with still suffering Vietnam veterans, and federal bureaucrats’ ignorance of his district’s immense size (its towns are nowhere near Albuquerque or Santa Fe), Pearce battled the Department of Veterans Affairs’ deep state.
Yet the Vietnam War, its ignored effect on his generation, and the largely unpaid debt to those who served, those who did not return, and those who returned unwelcomed and forgotten gnawed at Pearce. More was required of him. Slowly, he realized he needed to undertake what he later called a pilgrimage — a solo, unannounced, unheralded, unremarked upon flight around the world — to present memorials in Vietnam and Thailand, and to tell the stories of his military brothers and sisters (the nurses to the heartbreaking casualties of the war). Over a two-year period, with charts, graphs, and maps, Pearce planned meticulously, telling no one, not even, until almost too late, Cynthia. Then, during a long congressional Easter recess in 2016, four months shy of his 69th birthday, after flying for more than four decades and logging 13,000 hours, Pearce flew alone into the dark skies over the Pacific Ocean.
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You Had a Good Home, But You Left… is the remarkable tale of Pearce’s 25,296-mile flight aboard a single-engine Mooney TLS, fitted with two 55-gallon gas drums in place of its rear seats and stripped of all but the most essential of gear, including a survival raft in case he ditched somewhere on the high seas. In the process of flying 12 hours a day, every day for weeks, logging more than 185 flight hours, landing at foreign terminals big, small, and barely there, Pearce pressed doggedly on, saved from one disaster after another through the grace of God and the love of Cynthia who followed the tiny blue dot on the computer that marked his 2.3 miles per minute progress around the globe.
It is also the story of the men and women he encountered, the gracious help they provided, and the wonder they experienced when they learned of his mission: “That is amazing and noble.” It is also about the fearful boy who became a courageous man, went to war, and then came home, not content but committed to do more. Mostly, however, it is about the people with whom Pearce served and his deep desire to pay some small tribute to their warriors’ sacrifice.
William Perry Pendley, a Wyoming attorney and a public-interest lawyer based in Colorado for three decades, with victories at the U.S. Supreme Court, served in the Reagan administration and led the Bureau of Land Management under President Donald Trump.