“Two things changed my life for the better,” says Tom Tessier ’74. “My Vietnam experience and my college experience.”
Tom, currently a successful financial advisor in Nashua, N.H., grew up in an inner-city Nashua neighborhood, the son of a disabled World War II veteran and one of seven children. He graduated from Nashua High School, joined the Air Force Security Forces (formerly Air Force Security Police) in January 1966, and served five combat tours in Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive, which began on January 31, 1968, changed everything. “My diary, which I kept daily for all of 1968 and 1969, documents more than 80 rocket and/or mortar attacks, along with three major ground assaults against the Tan Son Nhut Airbase. Tom’s unit, the 377th SPS, is the most decorated ground unit in U.S. Air Force history.
Sitting in his Nashua office, separated by more than four decades from the horrors of war, Tom recalls the other event that shaped his character.
“I was sitting in a bunker in Vietnam reading a letter I’d received from a boyhood friend,” he said. “There was an application to New Hampshire College, and he wrote, ‘When you get out of the service, you should go to this school, where all your buddies just graduated from.’”
In the fall of 1970, Tom joined a group of young veterans who were starting classes at New Hampshire College. At 23, Tom and the other veterans were five years older than their freshman classmates. Many of their friends had already graduated from college and were starting jobs and families.
“We were on a mission. Whatever it took, we were going to do it,” Tom said.
In 1974, Tom earned his bachelor’s degree in accounting and was hired as a patient account manager by St. Joseph Hospital in Nashua. One opportunity led to another, and in 1984 he joined Bob Weisman, a Nashua insurance and investment advisor, and the two formed Weisman and Tessier Associates. In the late 1990s, two more names, Lori K. Lambert and Kevin J. Halloran, were added to the letterhead.
Tom looks back on his experiences in Vietnam and at New Hampshire College with gratitude. In the late 1980s, Tom and his friend Rick Courtemanche ’73 established the Vietnam Veterans Scholarship Fund, now the Veterans Scholarship Fund, at Southern New Hampshire University.