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.

Anyone who missed that clue would be all caught up moments later when he began speaking.

“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 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.

“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.”’

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 moral courage, when nobody’s looking. Those traits that perhaps they don’t have. And when you see them get on that bus to go home ... it becomes real. I just impacted the heart of a man. I just changed the heart of a man. To me, there’s no greater joy.”

His own journey to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in Parris Island, S.C., oddly enough, started with an appreciation for a sharp uniform.

He had already decided to join the Army as a 16 year old until a chance encounter changed the course of his life.

“As I was walking out of the recruiting station on Broadway in Newburgh, New York, I saw this guy, a black guy about my height,” he said. “His name was Alexander Peace. I was 100 percent civilian, and I was like, ‘yo man. Where did you get that suit from?’ And like any good recruiter, he said, ‘you can get one, too.’”

It was, of course, a blue Marine Corps uniform — one that Durham would come to know very well.

“I still have mine in the closet,” he said. “It fits somebody, but not me.”

While spending more than three decades in the Corps, Durham also built a family. He and his wife, Tina, have four children, Devell III, Devaughn, Alyssa and Jonathan. Helping the latter two children form an appreciation for their country was part of the reason the Durhams wound up in Johnston County.

“We did everything without even looking,” he said. “I never heard of Clayton or thought of Clayton. We wanted our children to experience the ambiance of a city, but we wanted to be able to escape from the city. Our daughter had spent her first 10 years of life overseas. And my son was born in mainland Japan in 2003. So, in their minds, America was a place you visited. And we had to keep telling them, ‘no, no. no. That’s home.’”

Durham closed his visit to Smithfield by doing 21 push ups to raise awareness for veterans. Well, 22 after doing one for the Corps.

And everyone in the room helped him count them off.

“Sometimes we can take for granted what a veteran brings to the fight,” he said. “The fight of growing a community. The safety of a community. The moral stability of the community.

“I want to be that voice. I’ve been blessed to still be able to speak, to still be able to move. I’ve been blessed to do almost 31 years of active duty. ... My children have been blessed. Because of my labor, they can go to college. I’ve been blessed, but the blessing is not for me. It’s to help somebody else.”