Virgil Melton Jr. traces the route taken by a tank convoy toward the Demilitarized Zone, marked in red, on a map of Vietnam he carried during the war on April 13, 2015, in Canton. Melton, 76, died Monday in a tragic weather-related car crash. (Andrew D. Brosig/Tyler Morning Telegraph File Photo)

From Staff Reports

A Van Zandt County commissioner died Monday after a tree fell on his car while he and his wife were driving home in a severe storm.

Pct. 2 Commissioner Virgil Melton Jr., 76, was driving on Farm-to-Market Road 279 around 8 p.m. in Edom when a tree fell and struck his car, killing him almost instantly, Van Zandt County Judge Andy Reese said.

Melton’s wife, Janice, 73, was transported to a Tyler hospital and is in critical condition, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.

No further information was available as of press time.

In a 2015 Tyler Morning Telegraph story, author Jacque Hilburn-Simmons wrote that Melton’s face always lit up when he talked about the night American tanks rolled along the moonlit coastline of the South China Sea and surrounded an enemy camp from atop a sandy ridge.

Melton, a Vietnam War Purple Heart recipient, was 19 years old on Aug. 15, 1968 when he led the caravan of 10 under the command of Capt. R.J. Patterson, a passenger aboard his craft.

“About a year earlier, the teenage Van Zandt County resident was attending Henderson County Junior College, feeling guilty about sitting in class while others were leaving for Vietnam,” the article reads. “When the teenager finally threw up his hands and told his parents he planned to join up, his mother dabbed away tears. His father, a Marine who fought in World War II, gave him a lift to the departure point and a solid handshake for luck.”

“Within a matter of months, Melton was in a tank in the thick of battle, a world away from the family farm, helping pull off a 1968 sneak attack” that he said was the most vivid of his military career, the article states.

He left Vietnam in August 1969.

“… I was happy to come home,” Melton said during the 2015 interview.

Melton served 21 months overseas, receiving a Purple Heart and Navy Commendation Medal for valor, the latter of which was awarded because he interrupted a planned grenade attack and saved several crew members.

“Vietnam will take a boy and make a man out of you pretty quick,” Melton said in the 2015 interview. “It takes its toll, but that’s what war is about … it’s ugly. We have to understand, if you love your country and you love your freedom, you have to be willing to fight for it.”

The 2015 article said Janice called her husband “her hero.”