Many of the usual signs of graduation were in evidence Monday night at the Auburn School District Administration Building – supporters, school board president with outstretched hand, diploma.

But the Auburn High School graduating class of Sept. 22, 2008, had one member, Jeff McIntyre, 59, and he walked to the front of the room without Pomp and Circumstance, without tassel, mitre board or robe to accept his diploma.

“Only took me 41 years to get it,” McIntyre said with a laugh.

McIntyre, a U.S. Army veteran, left high school in 1967 to join the Army. He earned his diploma via Operation Recognition, a program run by the Washington State Department of Veterans Affairs. Since 2002, lawmakers have passed three bills allowing school districts to award full high school diplomas, first to qualifying Veterans of World War II, then to those who fought in the Korean War and finally to Vietnam era veterans.

On its Web site, the VA calls the diploma “a small, overdue gesture of our society’s gratitude” for the sacrifices these men and women made on behalf of their country.

McIntyre, today a building maintenance technician for the City of Auburn, grew up in Redondo, Beach, Calif. He quit school at 18 to enlist in the Army. With an eye on the war then raging in Vietnam, his parents were against it.

“I was short on credits to graduate and joined the service,” McIntyre said. “It didn’t bother me because I ended up getting my GED in the Army. I tried to do it stateside, but you have to do it all in one place. I took the tests here and got shipped to Vietnam. Then they said I had to start all over. I managed to take the five tests over a period of a year and finally got it.”

As an Army parachute rigger for the 82nd Airborne Division, McIntyre helped airlift supplies to front line soldiers, often flying low, vulnerable to enemy fire. He spent most of his service in Cam Ranh Bay, Na Trang and Phan Rang near the U.S. Airforce Base, rigging air deliveries. He saw service at Khe Sanh, where the North Vietnamese Army had U.S Marines pinned down for 77 days.

“We did all the air delivery rigging for them,” McIntyre said. “If not for us, they probably would have been overrun.”

When McIntyre got out of the service in 1970, he logged trees in Northern California. In 1974 he moved north to the Pacific Northwest, working in logging and construction before his hire by the city of Auburn. And along the way he has kept involved in veteran’s affairs.

But he never got his diploma.

When McIntyre learned that the program had been expanded to Vietnam veterans, he filled out the paperwork and submitted it.

“Other vets can do the same thing I did,” McIntyre said. “They don’t have to have their GED to get this, either.”

Auburn School District Superintendent Kip Herren said the district was happy to perform the service.

“We think it’s one of the significant things we can do as a community when young men and women are providing service to our country that has interrupted their education,” Herren said. “The kind of service that Jeff rendered in Vietnam, that kind of sacrifice he and others like him made, whether in WWII, Korea or Vietnam, really is deserving of a high school diploma.”

Military service has a long and storied history in the McIntyre family. His late father, Edward Ray McIntyre, served in the Army Air Corps in the South Pacific during World War II and survived the Bataan Death March in 1942. McIntyre’s own son, Jesse, is an Army combat engineer.

McIntyre said Jesse called Monday to congratulate the old man.

“… He thinks it’s kind of cool, though I’ve gone without it for 41 years,” McIntyre said. “I am three to four years from retirement. I already asked the mayor about my raise now that I’ve got my diploma. He just laughed.”