|
This
past weekend one of our local towns sponsored the presentation of the
replica "Viet Nam wall" to Long Island.
A newspaper publicity photo showed that one of our local Diehard
Engineer vets was active in the program.
Sunday afternoon at 5PM, I decided that I would go over and visit the
wall for a few minutes, then come home and finish up the weekend's task
that my wife had put on my list.
When I got there, I didn't realize that on Long Island, we make a
federal case of these presentations.
I got there as the fire department's bag pipe band was finishing their
program.
The volunteer fire department had set up their tallest ladder trucks
making an honor arch.
There was a program with all the local dignitaries.
They even had former Pittsburgh running back Rocky Bleier as the
featured speaker.
Rocky spoke about his whole story from school to Nam to the Steelers,
for about 20 minutes.
Next, the town had all the Nam (and other war) veterans stand in the
center and they played an appropriate Billy Joel Nam was song.
I searched out this fellow Bill Torres who was on the committee.
Bill was in Bill Green's platoon in Lai Khe during 1969-70.
Torres had been featured last year, with an old photo, in our local
Long Island paper, on Veteran's Day.
In that picture, he was featured with his pet monkey.
This was odd to me, because on our Diehard website, I had posted a
photo of Juan Moncivaiz and Tom Kurkjian also with a monkey.
Juan had told me later that both the monkeys were actually a pair, a
male and a female.
I finally tracked down Bill Torres in the crowd.
He was wearing a new, clean and starched pair of fatigues with a purple
dickey that apparently signifies a purple heart.
I was wearing my original Lai Khe washed out/ greenish fatigue shirt
with the Diehard patch on the pocket.
We exchanged warm greetings.
Bill's wife was in charge of the book with the location of all the
names on the wall.
I have attached a photo of our meeting in front of the wall.
I am the one in half a military uniform (sorry Col Cox, the original
pants have shrunk.)
David Cepler
|
