John Blair · Retired; former Executive Director, TRIB Group, and Vice President of Sales, PTS Financial Services · U.S. Marine Corps · 1966–1972
In late November 1968, a few days before Thanksgiving, Sergeant John Blair stepped off a plane at Los Angeles International Airport after thirteen months in Vietnam. He and his Marine buddy Bob Centerbar went straight to the airport lounge. While they sat at the counter, a pair of young men in the style of the day came over with their girlfriends, picked up John’s beer, poured it on his pant leg, and asked him how many babies he had killed.
John was about to answer with his fist when Bob caught his arm. “Blair… don’t do it.” The two Marines looked around and saw that no one in the lounge cared what had just happened. They changed into jeans and left. John was headed home to Columbus, Georgia, and for the next four decades he did not talk about Vietnam.
From Military Family to Marine Corps Service
He had grown up a long way from that lounge. John was born at Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, and raised in Honolulu, the son of James Marion Blair, a career Army warrant officer who had been at Pearl Harbor during the attack and who rose to Chief Warrant Officer 4 over twenty-one years of service, and Elizabeth Arceo, a native Hawaiian with six brothers. The family lived in Hawaii and on Okinawa before his father retired from the Army at Fort Benning, and John graduated from Columbus High School in 1963.
His father died of a heart attack when John was sixteen, and the loss unmoored him. He tried college part time while working, got in and out of trouble, and by his own account was not the son he should have been.
One evening in December 1965, driving home from his job at the Columbus Coca-Cola Company, he pulled up in front of the Marine Corps recruiting office and sat there in his car until he had made up his mind. He knew the war was escalating and that he would probably be sent to Vietnam. He enlisted anyway, and he has never doubted the choice. To this day he calls it the best decision he could have made, and he is sure that without it he would have ended up in jail.
Vietnam Combat and the Silver Star
He reported to Parris Island in March 1966 and came out of boot camp as an 0311 rifleman, the Marine infantryman known as a grunt. After a year at the Marine Barracks at Cecil Field, Florida, and further combat training at Camp Pendleton, California, he arrived in Da Nang in late October 1967. From there he went north to Dong Ha and Con Thien, the outpost along the Demilitarized Zone whose name means the Hill of Angels, and joined India Company, 3rd Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, 3rd Marine Division, a platoon that called itself the Thundering Third.
For eleven of his thirteen months in country, the Marines of India Company lived in the open among the hills and valleys along the DMZ, moving every two or three weeks and digging in on hilltops whenever they could. “You never complained,” John says, “because you were with your Marine brothers every day.”
On the morning of January 27, 1968, the battalion came under heavy attack along Highway 9 from a large North Vietnamese force, in a fight the Marines remember as the Battle of Mike’s Hill. John’s company commander, Captain Pritchett, was among those killed. John, then a corporal and a squad leader, was separated from much of his platoon in the confusion, and he remembers praying aloud for courage, to God and to his mother.
Then he went to work. He moved his squad forward and led an assault on the enemy, and when the platoon was pinned down by a .50-caliber machine gun, he crawled across an open field through the kill zone and destroyed the gun position himself, saving the lives of many Marines. The fight lasted from seven in the morning until about five in the afternoon. For his actions that day, John Blair was awarded the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest decoration for valor in combat.
The months that followed brought the siege of Khe Sanh during the Tet Offensive, and later the defense of Foxtrot Ridge, along with many smaller firefights. John hated the artillery more than anything else in the war, the shells that came in from across the border day after day while the Marines could only pray they would land somewhere else.
Prayer, he says, was all they had in battle, and it carried them through the hardest hours, which came after the fighting stopped, when the Marines cared for the brothers they had lost. Not a day goes by that he does not think about Vietnam, sometimes for a few seconds and sometimes, when he is alone, for several minutes. He has made his peace with that. “It’s part of my life,” he says, “and to me that is normal.”
In addition to the Silver Star, John’s decorations include the Navy Achievement Medal with Combat “V,” the Combat Action Ribbon, the Vietnam Service Medal with four bronze service stars, the Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal, and several unit citations. He left the Marine Corps as a staff sergeant.
Finding Pride in His Service After Vietnam
Then came the welcome he did not get. John says now that the Marines in Vietnam had no idea what was happening at home. There was no television and no way to call, and his mother’s letters never mentioned the protests. Nothing prepared him for that lounge in Los Angeles, or for a homecoming in which no one said they were glad he was back. He kept the war to himself until 2010.
The following year he joined the Marine Corps League detachment in Woodstock, Georgia, and made a decision about how he would carry his service from then on. He would wear his Marine Corps shirts and hats, and he would display the awards he had earned, as a way of honoring the Marines he served with. It was time, he decided, to show how proud he was to have served in Vietnam and in the United States Marine Corps.
The men of India Company still gather every year, and they call those reunions Brothers Forever. At one of them, a fellow Marine told APRO’s then Executive Director Bill Keese, “I would follow John through hell – and I did.”
A Legacy of Leadership in Rent-to-Own
The rent-to-own industry knew John Blair long before it knew his war record. He joined Broyhill Furniture Rentals in 1973 and rose to Regional Vice President. In the mid-1980s he became the first Executive Director of the TRIB Group, and he led it into the next decade before moving into vendor sales and then into fifteen years as Vice President of Sales at PTS Financial Services, retiring in 2023.
Along the way, he served for years on APRO’s Vendor Advisory Committee and was named APRO Vendor of the Year in 2009, the same year TRIB Group inducted him into its Hall of Honor. In 2020 TRIB Group renamed that Hall of Honor in his honor, a surprise announced at a meeting where John had organized the opening color guard of military veterans.
“I never dreamed the Hall of Honor would one day carry my name,” he said. He is quick to say that the industry has given back to veterans in return, and that through his career he watched rent-to-own franchises and companies support veterans, homeless veterans, and their families through charities and fundraising. It was, he says, his honor and privilege to work in rent-to-own.
The honors from his military service came late, and they came in public. In 2016 John was inducted into the Georgia Military Veterans Hall of Fame for valor, one of seventeen inductees chosen that year from more than a hundred nominees, and his photograph now hangs in the Georgia State Capitol. He has served on the Hall of Fame’s board and as its chief operating officer, and he speaks regularly at veterans and Marine Corps events. He and his wife, Diane, have been married fifty-six years, and he dedicates his story to her, to their children April, David, and Michael, and to their grandchildren.
Asked what the Marine Corps taught him, John answers without hesitation. Attitude matters. A good name and integrity are priceless, and honesty and kindness belong in everyday life. The things that matter most are faith, family, friends, and good health, and he is certain that nothing can separate him from God’s love. He signs his story the way Marines do: Semper Fi. Fifty-eight years after a lounge in Los Angeles, the welcome he never received is one the rest of us are still able to give.
About TRIB Group
TRIB Group, also known as The Rental Industry Buying Group, is a member-owned nonprofit buying cooperative serving rent-to-own dealers across the United States. The organization has helped independent and multi-location rent-to-own operators leverage collective buying power for products, services, rebates, special pricing, and other business resources. TRIB Group represents thousands of rent-to-own store locations nationwide, co-hosts RTO World with APRO, and has been an APRO vendor member since 1983.
