Quinn Allred on Lehi History, Vietnam Service, and the American Legion | Roots & Branches of Lehi

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Quinn Allred on Lehi History, Vietnam Service, and the American Legion | Roots & Branches of Lehi

Quinn Allred: Service, Survival, and the Spirit of Lehi

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Role in Lehi

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Key Takeaways

Moments That Mattered

The Helicopter He Wasn’t On

Hidden Food and a Facebook Reunion

The Lehi Free Press Across the Pacific

Sweat Equity and a Father’s Help

Stepping Up for the Legion

What This Interview Teaches Us About Lehi

Ideas Woven Through Quinn’s Life

Words That Stay With You

Related Lehi Topics

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Portrait of Quinn Allred

Historic Lehi Main Street

American Legion Events

Vintage Lehi Free Press

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A lifelong Lehi resident reflects on growing up in a town where everyone knew your name, flying intelligence missions over Vietnam, and leading the American Legion for more than fifteen years.

Recorded 2025

Hosted by Ryan Harding

In this episode of Roots and Branches of Lehi , host Ryan Harding sits down with Quinn Allred, a man whose memory stretches across seven decades of Lehi history. Quinn arrived in Lehi as a fourth-grader in 1956, when Main Street was still lined with businesses run by World War I veterans and the town’s graduating classes numbered fewer than one hundred students.

Quinn’s path carried him from the classrooms of Carl Miller to the mountains of Vietnam, where he served in Army intelligence operations and narrowly survived a helicopter crash that claimed the lives of sixteen crew members. He returned home with a deepened sense of purpose, building a career in HVAC, raising a family, and eventually stepping up to lead Lehi’s American Legion Post for fifteen years when no one else would.

This conversation is a testament to the values that have long defined Lehi, Utah: service, resilience, neighborliness, and an unshakable connection to place. Whether you are researching Lehi history, Utah veterans’ stories, or the evolution of small-town life along the Wasatch Front, Quinn’s firsthand account offers rare perspective.

Pull up a chair and listen to Quinn share the moments that shaped his life—from hidden food stores in a Vietnam orphanage to early mornings at the American Legion breakfast table.

Quinn Allred

Vietnam Veteran; former American Legion Post Commander; HVAC Professional

1950s – Present

Lehi history, Vietnam intelligence operations, American Legion leadership, youth scholarships, community change

Quinn was scheduled to fly aboard a UH-1 Huey on a mission over Vietnam. At the last moment, his company commander called him away to brief a field commander. The helicopter went down. All sixteen crew members were lost, never to be found. The experience left him with a lifelong question: “Why me?”

While stationed in Pleiku, Quinn and a few fellow soldiers discovered that Viet Cong fighters were stealing food from local Catholic orphanages. They built hidden storage compartments to protect the supplies. Decades later, one of those children—now a grown woman named Janet—found Quinn on Facebook. She had survived a two-hundred-mile barefoot trek, become a refugee, and was adopted by a family in Michigan. She still remembered the soldier who danced with her when she was two years old.

Betty Fowler of the Lehi Free Press made sure that copies of the hometown newspaper reached Lehi soldiers overseas. For Quinn, those pages were a lifeline. “When I thought of home,” he said, “I thought of Lehi.”

Returning from war, Quinn used a Vietnam veteran readjustment program to build his first home on Fifth West and Sixth North. He, his father, and his brother poured the concrete and raised the walls together.

When the American Legion Post Commander stepped down in 2010 and no one volunteered to replace him, Quinn raised his hand. What began as a one-year commitment stretched into fifteen years of service, youth mentorship, and veteran advocacy.

A Town Governed by Veterans. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lehi’s civic and commercial life was shaped by World War I veterans. Herman Goates, the stake president, had served in the Great War. Tommy Powers, Glen Laney, and George Laney—all names still familiar in Lehi—ran businesses along Main Street and set the tone for a community built on discipline and mutual trust.

The Role of Local Newspapers. The Lehi Free Press was more than a source of news; it was a thread connecting home to war. Betty Fowler’s habit of mailing copies to deployed soldiers underscores how tightly knit Lehi was—and how seriously residents took their responsibility to one another.

Schools and Social Life. Quinn’s graduating class numbered just ninety-seven students. By contrast, Lehi High School today serves thousands. The old tabernacle served as the central gathering place for father-son banquets and community events, a physical anchor for social life that has since given way to larger, more dispersed institutions.

Growth and Its Consequences. Lehi’s population explosion has brought economic opportunity, but Quinn notes what has been lost: the intimacy of a class that felt like family, the grocer who knew your name, and the six policemen who knew every kid in town by sight.

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This episode connects to a broader archive of Lehi, Utah history and community storytelling. Readers interested in Quinn’s experiences may also want to explore these threads across the Roots & Branches of Lehi collection:

A contemporary photograph for the episode header and social sharing.

1950s–60s streetscape showing the businesses Quinn mentions.

Local gatherings, color guards, or scholarship presentations in Lehi.

Newspaper pages or clippings from the Vietnam era.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Speaker labels and paragraph breaks have been added for clarity.

Ryan Harding:

Welcome to Roots and Branches of Lehi, the podcast where we get to know the faces, stories, and lives that make up our community. I'm Ryan Harding, and I started this podcast as a way for us all to connect with the people we live alongside. Growing up in a small town, I learned that connections go beyond blood. They're built through shared experiences, friendships, and the moments we celebrate together. Each week, we'll sit down with someone new from Lehi to share their unique story, their passions, and what they love most about living here. So whether you've been here for years or just arrived, join us as we deepen our roots and reach out to our branches one story at a time. Welcome Quinn Allred to Lehi Roots and Branches, where we get to know the people of Lehi. You're one of those guys. Well, thanks for coming. I appreciate you coming. Give us a little background of you. Did you grow up here? Where are you from originally?

Quinn Allred:

My parents moved here to Lehi in 1956. I was in the fourth grade when I started. Carl Miller was my fourth grade school teacher. And so I've known Lehi since then. Long time. That's about it. I've been here ever since, other than my time on an LDS mission and four years active duty in the military.

Well, let's talk about that. What led you to join the military?

Basically, when I came home from my mission, it was during the Vietnam War. I got home in 1967. It was at the height of the draft. I wanted to go to school, but none of the colleges in Utah were accepting undergraduates. They were saving their deferments for postgraduates. So, basically, I had nowhere to go. It was hard to find a job. I was just a high school graduate. And so when I got my draft notice, I just went down and joined. I decided that if I was going to go into the military, I was going to do something that I wanted to do rather than let them choose.

And so did you end up going to Vietnam?

Yes. The story behind that is I joined the Army Security Agency, which was a four-year commitment rather than a three-year commitment. One of their selling points was that there is no ASA in Vietnam—which was true. There was no ASA. The Army Security Agency was a branch of the National Security Agency. It was a military branch. We answered only to the NSA and had our own command structure, and you had to have a top secret security clearance to belong to it.

I went through that basically as a draftee. I went into Fort Ord, California for basic infantry training. If my clearance hadn't come through, I would have been in the infantry anyway, because I was being trained as a scout, sniper, and mortar man. My preliminary clearance came through and I was sent from there to Monterey, California to the Defense Language Institute because I scored high on the aptitude test for learning languages. There they assigned me Spanish, which I already knew how to speak because I went to Mexico on my mission. I challenged the course, passed, and was only there a month. They sent me on to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, where the Army Security Agency did 90% of their training.

I was supposed to go in there as a crypto analyst, but they didn't have any classes going. So they moved me over into basic Morse code. You had to learn Morse code and be able to copy on a mill—a typewriter with all uppercase letters and numbers. To pass the class you had to be able to copy fifteen groups per minute, which is five random letters broken up into five-letter groups. Then there were several different options. One of them was high-speed intercept operator, which meant you had to learn to copy up to thirty groups per minute. I never could copy that fast, so I was sent to what they called a special identification techniques operator.

I had to be able to send and receive Morse code up to twenty-five groups per minute, which was easy for me. I went through that twenty-seven-week course, passed in the upper 10% of my class, and was sent on to analyst training to be able to analyze and plot locations of enemy transmitters on a map. Then I got my orders to be deployed to Bad Aibling, Germany. Between that time and deployment, President Johnson decided he needed fifty thousand more troops in Vietnam. They changed my orders while I was on leave and sent me to Vietnam.

I went to Oakland, California, loaded onto a plane, and my next stop was Saigon. My first tour of duty was a year. Then I extended my tour so I could fly. There was a top secret program called Left Bank. The NSA had developed helicopters so we could do the same thing I was doing at base camps, only from an airborne platform. I learned to fly my position in a UH-1 Huey helicopter. We flew low and slow in circles until we located enemy ground units, then sent that information on to field commanders. We were a direct support unit in direct support of the Fifth Special Forces and the Fourth Infantry Division.

I flew in UH-1 Hueys and OV-1 Mohawks—a twin-seat turboprop. We flew up and down the rivers. It had side-search radar, so we would look under the trees, fly up the rivers, and over the Ho Chi Minh Trail into Cambodia and Laos. That was all hush-hush; we weren't there. I did that from February into May. Then I was TDY—temporary duty—so I didn't have to fill a whole tour, only about five or six months. I came back and they sent me to Fort Huachuca, Arizona to teach classes on how to run that position out of an airborne platform. Then I went to Vint Hill Farms Station in Virginia, a top secret installation in Warrenton. It was a worldwide intercept area. None of these places exist anymore.

Going back to your Vietnam experience, any stories that defined that experience?

I always told my children that Vietnam was 90% boredom and 10% sheer terror. The crews that I flew with—sixteen of them are still there. They were lost, never found. Jaguar 21 went down. I was supposed to be on that flight, but I had been called by the company commander to give a briefing to the field commander that morning. They took me off that flight and I stayed behind to do the briefing to the commanding general of the Fourth Infantry Division. At the end of the briefing, we found out the helicopter had gone down. We got in all the helicopters we could, went out looking, and found the wreckage, but there was nobody there. No evidence of anybody dying. We destroyed the helicopter because everything on it was top secret. We spent weeks looking and never found any evidence as to where they went—no ground intelligence to find out if they had been captured or killed. Still to this day we don't know. That was probably the most defining moment. If I'd been on that flight, I'd have been there. You always wonder—why me?

Most of our ground-based operations were done in the back of a three-quarter-ton truck van. It had an array of directional antennas. We could tell which direction the radio signal was coming from. By taking a bearing on a compass, you would triangulate, and at those distances—if you were twenty-five miles away—there was about an 85% chance it was right there. Then they would call in artillery and bomb raids on those areas, because these units we listened to were four or five thousand men. Your chances of doing damage were pretty high.

I spent my off time working in an orphanage. I was in Pleiku, up in the central highlands, where the Montagnards mostly lived. There were a lot of orphans in Catholic orphanages. We found out that at night the Viet Cong would collect their taxes by stealing food from the children. A few of us got together and went into the orphanages and built hiding places for their food. We got along great with the kids; the kids loved Americans. The mother superior at one of them knew I was Mormon and always laughed when she said, "What was a Mormon doing in a Catholic orphanage?" We got along great.

We would take our liquor and cigarette allowance, sell it to other GIs, and take that money to buy food in town and give it to the orphanages. I did that for the whole fifteen months I was there. Later in life, I was on Facebook and got a message on Messenger. It was a picture of me and a little girl—I had her on my foot and we were dancing. She was probably two or three years old. It was the little girl. She remembered my name, looked me up on Facebook, and we still correspond. She's probably in her late fifties now, married to an ex-Marine in Michigan. He's a county sheriff. They have four children together. She's a sweetheart and we send Christmas cards.

She was a boat person. When Saigon fell in 1975, she and her grandmother walked barefoot from Pleiku to Nha Trang—about two hundred miles. The whole time, the Viet Cong and communists were trying to kill them, so they moved only at night. They finally got put on a boat and she ended up in the Philippines. The American government was accepting refugees, and she was sent to Fort Smith, Arkansas. A young couple from Michigan adopted her and changed her name. She was raised with an American name. Her name is Janet now. She has a group on Facebook that honors all of the veterans. To this day, she's very adamant about remembering the veterans that helped.

How did your military service shape your understanding of community?

I left Lehi in 1965–1967. Back in those days, the Lehi Free Press had a lady named Betty Fowler. She was the mother of one of my classmates, Bill Fowler. She was always at every one of our sporting events and school events, and she followed everything. When I went to Vietnam, I got the Lehi Free Press. Sometimes it came once a month, sometimes weekly, but she made sure all the military personnel from Lehi got copies to let them know what was going on back home. I went and told her that when I got home, and it brought tears to her eyes because she knew that we knew. Whenever I thought of home, I thought of Lehi. When I came back, I've been here ever since.

When I grew up, it was all World War I veterans that basically ran Lehi. Herman Goates was the stake president—he was a World War I veteran. All of the merchants up and down Main Street were World War I veterans: Tommy Powers, Glen Laney, George Laney. I knew all of them, and I knew their kids because I went to school with them.

What profession did you go into after returning?

I went to school on the GI Bill at what was then Utah Trade College. I wanted to work in the medical field, so I went into X-ray technician training. I got out of the military a little early—two months—so I could make it into school. Come to find out, the X-ray technician class was not accredited and I couldn't draw GI Bill money for it, so I transferred into heating and air conditioning—HVAC. I went to school for two years and got my associate degree. Now it's called UVU. It used to be down on University Avenue in Provo.

When I first came home, I got into the Vietnam Veteran Readjustment Program. You could build your own home on sweat equity. My dad was a contractor, so him, me, and my brother built my first home over on Fifth West and Sixth North in the Stewart subdivision. I got my GI loan and my GI Bill, and the military basically shaped what I did for the future.

When did you become head of Lehi's American Legion?

I made a living from the time I got out of school working for a place that sold oxygen and nitrogen to Geneva—National Cylinder Gas. It was sold several times, and when Geneva shut down I lost my job. I've been in refrigeration and air conditioning, low-temperature refrigeration, right on up. I've had four or five jobs since I graduated. My last job was working for the Larry H. Miller Group as maintenance superintendent for Jordan Commons in Sandy. I spent eleven years there.

I joined the American Legion in 1973, but I never went to any meetings until probably 2003. I didn't feel comfortable at first; the veterans were all older than me and the meetings were boring. I rode a motorcycle—a Harley-Davidson—and was approached to join the American Legion Riders. That got me back into the American Legion. You had to attend meetings to belong to the club. We went on a lot of fun motorcycle rides.

Harold Finn was the post commander. He stepped down, another gentleman took his place, but he had a stroke and couldn't perform. That was in 2010, and nobody would step up. After about six or seven months, I said, "If you guys are looking for somebody to conduct the meetings, I'll do it." The next week I was post commander. I've had it ever since—fifteen years. I'm going to give it up this month in May. We need somebody younger, with the drive or ambition to keep going. Every time I held elections, they said, "Where the hell you think you're going? You're still in it." I've seen a lot of veterans come and go. We just buried one of our old stalwarts—Wilkie. He had a barber shop here in Lehi when I was a kid.

Carl Moore, all of the old World War II veterans are just about gone. We have one World War II veteran left in our post, Jesse Beach. He served in World War II and Vietnam. He's ninety-six years old now.

What are some things you're proud of from your fifteen years?

Since I've been post commander, we've spent most of our time serving the youth of Lehi through scholarships. The premier program statewide and nationwide is Boys State, for juniors in high school. They go to Weber State and learn how government works—it's basically a civics class. They're given a one-week course on forming a government from city right up to national. Speakers come and talk to them, they run for office, and learn Robert's Rules of Order.

We have them come back, sponsor them, and pay their way when we have the money. Lehi City and the Civic Improvement Association have been major donors. Our last Boys State, we paid each one $500. We sent seven boys. The auxiliary sends the girls to Girls State to do the same thing.

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