Appalachian Figures Series – The Story of Ronald D. Ray of Perry, Kentucky
On a ridge above Frankfort, where the wind comes hard off the Kentucky River, a granite sundial throws its shadow across a fan of stone. Each day the shadow falls on the name of a Kentuckian killed in Vietnam, timed to the anniversary of that soldier or Marine’s death. The Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the most ambitious pieces of public memory work in the Commonwealth, and at the center of its story stands a man who began life much farther east in the coalfields.
Colonel Ronald Dudley Ray was born in Hazard, Perry County, on 30 October 1942, the son of Robert Wallace Ray and Josephine McKay Jones Ray. His father served as a Navy pharmacist’s mate during the Second World War, and during those years Josephine took their young son to Louisville to be near her family in the Germantown neighborhood. From that Appalachian starting point, Ray would move through Centre College and the University of Louisville School of Law, the jungles of Vietnam, the E Ring of the Pentagon, and a long second career as a Kentucky attorney, culture warrior, and advocate for veterans with traumatic brain injury. The memorial on the hill is part of that story, but only part.
This essay follows Ray from Hazard to Frankfort and back again in memory, using his own words where possible and anchoring the narrative in oral histories, official citations, and Kentucky public records.
From Hazard to Centre College
The surviving biographies are clear on the essentials. Ray’s family traced its roots to Perry County, and multiple reliable summaries, including the Kentucky Marines “Legend” profile and his family’s own site, agree that he was born in Hazard on 30 October 1942. His parents married in Kentucky in 1940, and Josephine’s obituary would later list “Colonel Ronald D. Ray” among her children, tying the highly decorated Marine officer back to the Hazard Ray and Jones families.
Ray came of age partly in Louisville, where he attended Waggener High School and met lifelong friends who would later appear in his obituaries and reminiscences. He entered Centre College in Danville already enlisted in the Marine Corps, participating in the Platoon Leaders Class program that would lead to a commission upon graduation. He completed his Bachelor of Arts in 1964, then went on to the University of Louisville School of Law, graduating magna cum laude in 1971 and serving as salutatorian of his class.
Those bare academic lines matter for the Appalachian story. At mid century, a Hazard native moving through Centre and U of L Law represented a familiar migration pattern for ambitious eastern Kentucky families, trading coal camp streets for college greens and professional offices but carrying county ties with them. Ray’s later work and advocacy always kept one foot in that Kentucky soil.
Learning War: From the Dominican Republic to Vietnam
Ray’s military career bridged the end of the old draft era and the beginning of America’s long, uneasy reckoning with Vietnam. Commissioned a Marine officer at Centre’s graduation, he was first tested not in Asia but in the Caribbean. In 1965 he served as one of the first Marine “peace officers” ashore during the evacuation of civilians in the Dominican Republic crisis, an operation he later described in oral history as his introduction to jungle warfare and irregular conflict.
His defining combat role came two years later. In 1967 and 1968, Captain Ray served as an Infantry Battalion Advisor to the South Vietnamese Marine Corps, attached to what U.S. sources called Task Force Alpha. The official Marine Corps history U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Defining Year 1968 identifies him by name in a photograph caption, standing among fellow advisors to the Vietnamese Marines during some of the most intense fighting of the war.
According to his Silver Star citations, preserved in the Military Times “Hall of Valor” and other compilations, Ray repeatedly exposed himself to heavy fire while directing artillery and air support in defense of South Vietnamese Marines under attack, continuing to coordinate the fight even after being wounded. He earned two Silver Stars for gallantry, a Bronze Star Medal with Combat “V,” the Purple Heart, and Vietnamese decorations including the Cross of Gallantry and the Honor Medal.
Those actions came at a cost he would not fully pay until decades later. Family accounts and his own biography note that in 1967 he suffered brain injuries that would, over forty years, develop into Lewy body dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and ALS. In his Newcomer Funeral Home obituary, friends and comrades remembered him as both warrior and guardian, a man whose “warrior mindset” in Vietnam was followed by a lifelong commitment to serving other veterans.
Telling the War in His Own Voice
Because Ray lived into the age of the cassette recorder and digital archives, historians have access to unusually rich oral history material. At least three major interview sets capture his voice and self-understanding.
In August 1999, Morehead State University’s Vietnam War Oral History collection recorded a four part interview with him at Crestwood, Kentucky. The catalog notes that he discussed his Kentucky upbringing, commissioning, advisory work with the South Vietnamese Marines during the Tet Offensive, battles at Hue and elsewhere, and his later work founding the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
Four years later, the Kentucky Oral History Commission’s Oldham County Veterans Oral History Project conducted another interview, summarizing his life arc from Hazard birth through deployments to the Dominican Republic, Norway, Panama, and Vietnam, then into law practice and veterans advocacy.
The Virginia Military Institute’s John A. Adams Center for Military History added a third layer in a 2004 Cold War Oral History Project interview that focused on his national level work with the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program.
Read together, these interviews show an eastern Kentucky native wrestling with war and memory. He talks as a Marine officer about tactics and operations, as a lawyer about statutes and cases, and as a veteran about grief and obligation. For Appalachian historians, they are primary sources not only on Vietnam but on how one Perry County family’s son narrated his journey through empire and back home.
Building a Sundial for the War Dead
The Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated at Frankfort on Veterans Day 1988, may be Ray’s most visible legacy. The idea grew out of his work in the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program, a Reagan era initiative that identified Vietnam veterans for civic leadership roles. Federal records from the Reagan Presidential Library list “Ron Ray, Chairman – Louisville, Kentucky,” and describe him as an infantry battalion advisor in Vietnam who later graduated magna cum laude from the University of Louisville School of Law. That blend of combat credit, legal training, and political savvy positioned him to spearhead a statewide memorial effort.
Archival descriptions from the Kentucky Historical Society’s collection of the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund explain that Ray and other veterans organized the Fund as a private nonprofit in the early 1980s, with encouragement from Governor Martha Lane Collins and the General Assembly. Their task was to design and finance a memorial honoring the more than one thousand fifty Kentuckians killed in Vietnam. State Guard publications such as the Bluegrass Guard newsletter and The Phantom’s Eye covered the unveiling of the design and the 1988 dedication, identifying Ray as the Fund’s founding chairman and noting that the group raised over one million dollars in private donations to build the granite sundial on the hill.
The concept was simple and audacious. The memorial’s designers calculated the position of the sun for every day of the year, then inscribed a Kentucky casualty’s name at the spot where the sundial’s shadow would fall on the anniversary of that person’s death. As Ray later put it in essays and talks on his family website, the goal was to tie the memory of each lost Kentuckian to the turning of the year so that “time itself” would participate in remembrance.
A photograph in the Catholic journal The Merton Seasonal shows Ray standing at the memorial, flanked by rows of names in stone. The same issue prints his poem “Narrow Way” along with a short note describing him as a convert to Roman Catholicism and as chairman of the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which “privately raised one million dollars” to construct the sundial memorial. In that brief sketch he credits the writings of Thomas Merton with helping him reframe his Vietnam experience as part of a spiritual journey, a telling detail for a man whose later work would be steeped in religious language.
From Hazard to the Pentagon and Back to Kentucky Law
Ray’s combat record and reserve service eventually carried him into the highest levels of the Pentagon. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan appointed him the first Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Guard and Reserve Affairs, with responsibility for policy guidance and oversight of roughly 1.8 million National Guard and Reserve personnel. The National Guard Association honored him with its National Eagle Award for that work the following year.
In 1990 President George H. W. Bush appointed him to the American Battle Monuments Commission, the federal body that builds and maintains overseas cemeteries and memorials. Two years later Ray joined the presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, which studied gender roles in the military in the immediate post Cold War era. These roles placed a Hazard born Marine at the center of national conversations about how the United States commemorates war and structures its armed forces.
Back in Kentucky, Ray practiced law with the Louisville firm Greenebaum, Doll & McDonald, heading its labor and employee relations section for many years and teaching as an adjunct at the University of Louisville School of Law. By the early 1990s he had left big firm practice and was operating what his biography calls a “unique blend of law and history” from his farm on Hall’s Hill near Crestwood. He amassed a library of some ten thousand volumes on American history and constitutional thought and became a familiar figure in conservative legal circles.
Law, Faith, and the Culture Wars
For many Americans who never visited the Frankfort memorial, Ray’s name surfaced most often in debates over religion, law, and sexuality. He wrote and spoke as a self described defender of “America’s Christian heritage,” and his arguments left a paper trail in court filings and polemical books.
During the 1990s, he authored a long essay titled “Military Necessity and Homosexuality,” published in the volume Gays: In or Out? The U.S. Military and Homosexuals, A Source Book from Brassey’s. In that work he argued that allowing openly gay and lesbian personnel to serve would undermine unit cohesion and military effectiveness. Scholars who later chronicled the “don’t ask, don’t tell” era often cited his essay as a representative statement of the opposition to lifting the ban.
From the perspective of historical analysis, Ray’s writings belong to a wider body of religious conservative responses to social change in the late twentieth century. Historians such as Kristin Kobes Du Mez, in works like Jesus and John Wayne, have pointed to figures like Ray as examples of Vietnam veteran activists who linked martial valor, evangelical Christianity, and resistance to liberalizing trends in gender and sexuality. His arguments drew sharp criticism from LGBTQ advocates and many military sociologists, who marshaled comparative research to challenge his claims about cohesion and readiness.
At the same time, Ray and his wife Eunice were compiling a very different kind of book. Endowed by Their Creator: A Collection of Historic American Military Prayers 1774 to the Present gathered more than two hundred eighty prayers used by American servicemembers from the Revolution onward. Reviews and later devotional essays describe it as a project of recovery and testimony, meant to show that American military life had long included explicit religious language and practices.
He brought the same convictions into his legal practice. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ray served as lead or co counsel for Kentucky counties and school boards defending Ten Commandments and “Foundations of American Law and Government” displays on public property. Federal court opinions in American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky v. McCreary County and in related Harlan County school cases list “Ronald D. Ray, Colonel, Crestwood, Kentucky” among counsel for the defendants. He also authored or co authored amicus briefs in cases challenging references to “Almighty God” in Kentucky’s homeland security statutes, arguing that such language reflected historical tradition rather than government establishment of religion.
These courtroom battles did not always go his way. The Ten Commandments displays, in particular, were ultimately struck down as unconstitutional endorsements of religion. Yet they cemented his reputation as a combative defender of public religious symbolism and as a familiar adversary to the ACLU and allied groups.
Traumatic Brain Injury and a Law in His Name
In his final decade, Ray’s life came full circle to the wounds he had sustained in Vietnam. As his family biography recounts, the brain injuries he suffered in 1967 slowly manifested as cognitive decline, Parkinsonian symptoms, and eventually a combination of Lewy body dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and ALS. His wife Eunice became an outspoken advocate for hyperbaric oxygen therapy, or HBOT, which some clinicians and veterans believe can improve outcomes for traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress, though it remains controversial and not widely accepted as standard care.
In 2018 the Kentucky General Assembly passed House Bill 64, codified in part at KRS 217.930 to 217.942, establishing conditions under which eligible veterans with traumatic brain injury could access HBOT in Kentucky hospitals and clinics. Section 8 of the act states that it “may be known as the Colonel Ron Ray Veterans Traumatic Brain Injury Treatment Act.” Legislative summaries and advocacy sites describe the law as a response to situations like Ray’s, in which veterans were denied HBOT because their TBI diagnoses did not fall within existing FDA treatment protocols.
Local news coverage of the bill’s progress in Frankfort captured Eunice Ray testifying about her husband’s combat concussion and the promise she saw in oxygen therapy for other veterans. As of 2024, follow up reporting noted that implementation has been uneven, with advocates still pressing health systems to fully honor the spirit of the law. Even so, the statute stands as a final link between a Hazard born Marine’s wartime injuries and the lives of younger veterans from Appalachia and beyond.
When Ray died on 6 July 2020, his obituary recorded that he was buried at Frankfort Cemetery, the same city where his sundial memorial keeps daily watch over Kentucky’s Vietnam dead. His family arranged for his brain and spinal cord to be donated to Boston University’s CTE Center, an act that placed his own suffering in the service of future medical research on blast injury and degenerative disease.
An Appalachian Life in the National Story
Seen from Hazard, Ronald D. Ray’s life might look like a departure, a trajectory that carried him away from eastern Kentucky into the Marines, the Pentagon, and high profile culture war fights. Yet the record suggests that the Appalachian roots mattered.
He was born in a coalfield city in the middle of the war years. His mother and father navigated a familiar eastern Kentucky pattern, moving between the mountains and Louisville in search of opportunity and family support. His most enduring public work, the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is less than two hours’ drive from Hazard and has become a pilgrimage site for Appalachian families tracing the names of sons and brothers lost in Southeast Asia.
In his own poem at the memorial, Ray imagined a soul “yearning to pray” and struggling to make sense of sin, memory, and grace before finding a kind of hard won forgiveness. That religious language shaped his legal advocacy in ways that many Kentuckians, especially LGBTQ citizens and secular neighbors, found troubling or exclusionary. At the same time, his fiercest energies in later life were spent on behalf of fellow veterans living with traumatic brain injury and post traumatic stress, many of them from the same counties and class backgrounds that propelled him into uniform.
There is another Ronald Ray in the national record, an Army officer from Georgia who received the Medal of Honor for heroism in Vietnam. The two men are often confused online, but the middle initial and birthplace matter. Ronald D. Ray of Hazard, Kentucky, was the Marine advisor in the paddies, the lawyer on the hilltop farm in Oldham County, the man whose name now marks a law meant to widen treatment options for wounded veterans.
For Appalachian historians and readers, his story offers a complicated figure. He was a Perry County native who helped build one of the Commonwealth’s most striking war memorials and who shaped state and national debates on veterans’ health, church and state, and military culture. To study Ronald D. Ray is to trace how a life that began in Hazard could leave marks on the stones of Frankfort, the law books of Kentucky, and the memories of those who served in Vietnam and came home to fight different battles.
Sources & Further Reading
Morehead State University. “Interview with Ronald D. Ray, August 21, 1999.” Vietnam War Oral History Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Morehead State University. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/vietnam_war_oral_history/132/
Kentucky Oral History Commission. “Interview with Ronald D. Ray, Oldham County Veterans Oral History Project, September 9, 2003.” Kentucky Historical Society and Oldham County Historical Society, Frankfort and LaGrange, KY. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://kentuckyoralhistory.org
John A. Adams ’71 Center for Military History and Strategic Analysis. “Interview with Ronald D. Ray (RayR_01), Cold War Oral History Project, 2004.” Virginia Military Institute Digital Collections. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://digitalcollections.vmi.edu/digital/collection/p15821coll17/id/175/
“Ronald D. Ray.” Hall of Valor: Military Times. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://valor.militarytimes.com
“Ronald Dudley Ray.” Home of Heroes (valor citation archive). Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.homeofheroes.com
“Colonel Ronald Ray Obituary – Louisville, KY.” Newcomer Funeral Home, Louisville, Kentucky, July 2020. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.newcomerkentuckiana.com/Obituary/184698/Colonel-Ronald-Ray/Louisville-KY
“Colonel Ronald D. Ray.” The Oldham Era obituary and memorial notice, 2020. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.legacy.com
“Colonel Ronald D. Ray – Biography.” ColRonRay.com (official family site). Accessed January 8, 2026. https://colronray.com/about-col-ron-ray/
Sears, Emily. “Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” ColRonRay.com. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://colronray.com/kentucky-vietnam-veterans-memorial/
“Legend: Colonel Ronald D. Ray.” KentuckyMarines.org. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://kentuckymarines.org/legends/colonel-ronald-d-ray/
“Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” Official site of the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Frankfort, Kentucky. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.kyvietnammemorial.net
“Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Inc. Records, 1983–1988.” Archival collection description, Kentucky Historical Society, Frankfort, Kentucky. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/data/70222246
“Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial Design Unveiled.” The Bluegrass Guard (Kentucky National Guard newsletter), August 1987. Kentucky National Guard History. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://kynghistory.ky.gov
“Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial Dedicated.” The Phantom’s Eye (Kentucky National Guard publication), November 5, 1988. Kentucky National Guard History. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://kynghistory.ky.gov
Telfer, Gary L., Lane Rogers, and V. Keith Fleming Jr. U.S. Marines in Vietnam: The Defining Year, 1968. Washington, DC: History and Museums Division, Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps, 1997. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.usmcu.edu
Reagan, Ronald. “Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program (VVLP) briefing materials.” Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, CA. Subject file: Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://www.reaganlibrary.gov
Ray, Ronald D. “Narrow Way.” The Merton Seasonal (Thomas Merton Center, Bellarmine University), c. 1980s. Reprinted with biographical note and photograph at the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://merton.org
Ray, Ronald D. “Military Necessity and Homosexuality.” In Gays: In or Out? The U.S. Military and Homosexuals, edited by Robert L. Maginnis et al., 77–118. Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 1993.
Ray, Ronald D. Military Necessity and Homosexuality: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on a Military-Cultural Phenomenon. Louisville, KY: First Principles Press, 1993. https://www.firstprinciplespress.org
Ray, Ronald D., and Eunice Marie Ray, eds. Endowed by Their Creator: A Collection of Historic American Military Prayers, 1774 to the Present. Louisville, KY: First Principles Press, various editions. https://www.firstprinciplespress.org
“18RS HB 64: An Act Relating to Traumatic Brain Injury Treatment for Veterans.” Kentucky General Assembly, 2018 Regular Session. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/18rs/hb64.html
“Kentucky Revised Statutes §§ 217.930–217.942.” Colonel Ron Ray Veterans Traumatic Brain Injury Treatment Act. Kentucky Revised Statutes, current through 2019. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/law/statutes
American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky v. McCreary County, Kentucky, 96 F. Supp. 2d 679 (E.D. Ky. 2000), aff’d 354 F.3d 438 (6th Cir. 2003). Opinion accessed via FindLaw, January 8, 2026. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-6th-circuit/1446551.html
McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky, 545 U.S. 844 (2005). Opinion accessed via Justia, January 8, 2026. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/545/844/
“McCreary County v. American Civil Liberties Union of Kentucky (2005).” First Amendment Encyclopedia, Middle Tennessee State University. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/mccreary-county-v-american-civil-liberties-union
“Ronald D. Ray.” Wikipedia, last modified 2025. Accessed January 8, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_D._Ray
Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York: Liveright, 2020. https://wwnorton.com
Green, Archie. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. https://press.uillinois.edu
Portelli, Alessandro. They Say in Harlan County: An Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. https://global.oup.com
Author Note: I wrote this piece to follow Colonel Ronald D. Ray from Hazard through Vietnam and into the long shadow of the Frankfort sundial he helped create. If your family has memories or photographs tied to the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial or to Ray’s work with veterans, I would be glad to help document and share them.