Commemorative pins
Vietnam veterans unable to attend Wednesday’s 50th anniversary ceremony of the war may receive a commemorative pin in the lobby of the Dayton VA Medical Center patient tower lobby from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. on the first Monday of most months.
Here are the dates this year:
April 4, May 2, June 6, July 11, Aug. 1, Sept. 12, Oct. 3, Nov. 7, Dec. 5.
James T. Hardy’s most poignant moment as a soldier in Vietnam came after he returned home.
The Army combat veteran was handing the burial flag to a mother of a fallen soldier at a funeral service in a small town in Pennsylvania when the flag was knocked out of his hands and he was grabbed by the lapel and asked, “Why did my son have to die in that damn war?”
Standing at a ceremony Wednesday inside a church on a hill that overlooks the white gravestones of the Dayton National Cemetery, he searched for an answer.
“When I looked at the mother, I didn’t have a good answer for her,” he told an audience of about 200 people inside the Protestant Chapel on the Dayton VA Medical Center campus. “Fifty years later, I still don’t have a good answer.”
But those who went did their duty, said Hardy, Dayton VA chief of staff and a physician, who hoped the ceremony Wednesday generations later would bring closure for some.
‘It means welcome home’
The pews of the historic chapel, built by Civil War veterans, were filled with Vietnam veterans who, like Hardy, received a commemorative pin and the thanks of those in attendance to mark the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War.
“It means welcome home, final recognition,” said John Hazelton, 73, a former Army medic who had two tours of duty in Vietnam. “About damn time.”
The contentious and unpopular war roiled the United States with protests and claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans, a war that ended without victory.
Retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Edward J. Mechenbier, 73, of Columbus, was shot down in an F-4 fighter jet over North Vietnam in June 1967. He was held as a prisoner of war for nearly six years.
Vietnam veterans were ready for a belated homecoming, he said.
“You are the brave,” he told the veterans. “You proved that. No one can take that away from you.”
Joseph M. Weaver, 70, was an Army helicopter mechanic in Vietnam in 1967. Decades later, the Tipp City man hasn’t forgotten the fellow soldier, and friend, killed when his helicopter was shot down.
“I decided after that that I wasn’t going to make any more friends over there,” Weaver said. “I would have acquaintances, but no more friends.”
When Weaver left Vietnam on New Year’s Day 1968 and returned to the United States, there were no handshakes or thanks for service. He was reminded of that, he recalled, eating breakfast with other soldiers at an airport in Seattle, Wash., waiting to catch a flight home.
“These people at another table turned and looked at us like we didn’t belong there,” the retired grocery worker said. “And they really gave us this look like, I wouldn’t say it was hate, but they were very unhappy with us. And all we had done was come home after a year.”
Weaver has had a sign that attitude has reversed. Someone paid the bill for the Army veteran, sporting a Vietnam veteran’s ball cap, and his wife, while they dined recently at a Troy restaurant.
“I had never met these people,” he said. “They said they wanted to thank us for our service.”
‘I cried a lot’
With tears often in her eyes, Catherine Beers put the commemorative lapel pins in the hands of veterans and hugged many of them as the aging soldiers stood single file in two lines to walk to the front of the church Wednesday.
Her father, Jack Blaine Beers of Allentown, Pa., was an Army soldier with the 101st Airborne Division when he was killed by a sniper in Vietnam on Easter Sunday, 1969.
“I cried, cried and cried a lot,” the 55-year-old Air Force veteran said, in the years since her father died. “Of course, last week was Easter Sunday and I sat there and cried. It means so much to me to be able to hand a pin to a Vietnam veteran and look him in the eyes and say, ‘Thank you for your service and welcome home.’ It was an injustice that the men who did come home came home to what they came home to.”
Wearing a Gold Star Wives cap, Cindy LaPointe-Dafler, 66, handed out pins to veterans, too. Her husband, Spec. 4th Class Joseph G. LaPointe, was killed in Vietnam in June 1969. The Dayton native posthumously received the Medal of Honor for medically treating two wounded soldiers while under heavy fire from an enemy bunker.
Wednesday’s ceremony “helps to heal not only (Vietnam veterans) but the community that thanks them and honors them,” said LaPointe-Dafler, of Jefferson Twp. “Some of the people in the audience may have been college students that were protesting and now they’ve come and seen that view, love the solider, hate the war.”
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