Veteran Service Award
Devell ‘Bo’ Durham Jr.
Retired Marine still serving his fellow veterans By Randy Capps
Devell Durham Jr. retired from the Marine Corps as a sergeant major on Halloween in 2010, and while he wasn’t wearing a uniform when he walked into an office in Smithfield on a sunny summer morning, the mirror gloss shine on his dress shoes was a pretty good indication on how he might have spent his professional life.
American Legion Post 71 in Clayton and commandant of Marine Corps League Detachment 1236 in Johnston County. He’s also active in the Smithfield Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 5886, the county Boy Scout programs, and is a member of the Johnston County Veterans Advisory Board to the County Board of Commissioners.
Anyone who missed that clue would be all caught up moments later when he began speaking.
“It’s important to me that veterans become part of the VA process to get what they have earned,” he said. “If I see a sticker on a car, if I see a veteran with a hat on, if I see anything that indicates that this individual may have served or is currently serving, I’ll accost them,” he said. “I’ll give them the five trick questions that don’t have an answer. They’re thought provoking. Basically, ‘Are you preparing for the future.”’
“I think it’s important that all veterans’ stories are told,” he said. “Little Johnny that’s going to be born next week is going to want to hear about his grandpa, that perhaps he’ll never get to meet.” It is that desire to help his fellow veterans that has earned him the 2020 Johnston Now Honors Veteran Service Award. Since his retirement from active duty, he has served as commander of 32 | JOHNSTON NOW
His commanding presence and a slight raspiness in his voice offers two other clues at how he might have spent some of his time in the Marine Corps.
“If I had to look back over the years and peel the onion back to say which period in my life was most profound, being a drill instructor was the most profound for me as a young man,” he said. “When you first start out as a drill instructor, technically you’re acting. ... You go to your first platoon, and the senior drill instructor says, ‘All I want you to do is this: I don’t want you to teach nothing; I just want you to stress them out. You’re the stress monster.’ Your job 24-7 is (to believe) there’s nothing that they can do right. He could jump off a building and land on both feet, and I’d say ‘You should have used your hands.’ “When you graduate that first platoon and you had the opportunity to see them in that civilian format, and what their parents took 18 and 19 years to try to do, you gut all that stuff out. I don’t care how great parents think they are, you have to gut it out. Then you pour into them what’s going to be needed on the battlefield. What’s going to be needed for
