In memoriam Archives

Tomorrow is Veterans Day. Here are my reflections, and suggestions on how to mark the occasion.

Silence

Veterans Day used to be called Remembrance Day, which harks back to the World War I armistice, which occurred on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

For years it has been marked by silence. Let's try to continue this tradition in an overly plugged-in world.

Put down the Blackberry, pull out the earbuds, turn off the iPad, embrace the hush, and reflect.

Poetry

If you live in the Washington area, drop in at the semi-annual gathering of The Memorial Day Writers' Project, organized by a bunch of my veteran friends, including fellow Marine Mike McDonell.

These are veterans who dare to declaim and you can find them in a tent behind the sidewalk facing Constitution Avenue near 21st Street in Washington. The offerings range from the profane to the profound, and I guarantee a laugh, and possibly a tear or too.

Read

Check out The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War, by Brandon Friedman, an Iraq 101st Airborne veteran and director of new media at the Veterans Affairs Department.

The reviews say Friedman nails combat, along with the absurdity that goes along with any endeavor managed by the Pentagon.

Visit

Walk the lines of tombstones at Arlington, become embraced by the walls of the Vietnam Memorial, and be one of the few people to visit the District of Columbia War Memorial, the closest thing in the Capital City to a World War One Memorial, in West Potomac Park, just off Independence Ave.

Wear

A flower poppy sold by VFW members to commemorate the poppies that Canadian poet John McRae used to evoke the fallen in his World War I poem, "In Flanders Fields":

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow,
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky,
The larks, still bravely singing, fly,
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead.
Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved and now we lie,
In Flanders Fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you, from failing hands, we throw,
The torch, be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us, who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Honor

Compose your own honor roll and send it here for posting.

Here's mine:

• My comrades from 2nd Battalion, 9th Marines and 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, Vietnam, 1965/1966 including Herbierto Gonzalez, Mike Metzger, Bill Schwartz, J.T. King, Larry Leal, Tom Wilmot and Mile Gullingsruud.
• Abigail Friedman: I have known and loved Abigail, a State Department Foreign Service officer who finished an Afghanistan tour this June working with provincial reconstruction teams, and her husband Eric Passaglia, for more than two decades and salute them both for their service. Abigail now serves as director for Afghanistan at the National Security Council.


• Lewis B. Puller Jr., friend and fellow Marine who touched me with his grace.


• Marine Maj. Cornelius Ram, the best company commander any Marine could ever have.


• Leon Daniel, Marine Korean War veteran and UPI bureau chief in Saigon on the last day of the Vietnam War. A friend, mentor and source of inspiration.

On Dec. 6, 1950, the 5th and 7th Marine regiments started their famed advance to the rear (Marines never retreat) from Chosin Reservoir in northeast Korea near the Chinese border to Hungnam, South Korea. They carried their dead and wounded in temperatures that hovered around 35 degrees below zero. The feat is celebrated in the Corps to this day, but it's an otherwise little known event in a widely ignored war.

Last week, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway dedicated a monument at Camp Pendleton in California to the Chosin Reservoir campaign, in which the Marines faced more than 100,000 Chinese troops and took more than 4,000 casualties.

Conway said while "Korea is often a forgotten war that many consider a police action, . . . we in the Marine Corps don't see it that way. We see it as a tremendous bright spot in our legacy."

If you want to learn more about this bit of Marine legacy, check out "The Chosin Few" documentary, which started to hit the movie theaters last week. It's directed by Brian Iglesias, a Marine Iraq combat veteran.

Semper Fidelis.

On Monday, we will (hopefully) stop to pause and remember those we have sent into harms way, and here are my reflections:

Marines

I had the privilege to serve in the comm platoon of three Marine infantry units, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment; 2nd Battalion, Ninth Marines; and 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines, 1963-1967, and consider this the key experience of my life.

Even though time has dimmed some memories of those years, I still remember some friends who in my mind's eye will always remain young, including Rex Dieterle, Miles Gullingsruud, Larry Leal, Joel Engebretsen, Tom Wilmot and our long suffering platoon sergeant, Herbierto Gonzalez.

My wife Deborah has met most of these folks, and agrees that Sgt. Gonzalez had ample reason for his long suffering. (A hint to reporters covering politicians claiming Vietnam service: ask to meet their platoon mates.)

I also had the pleasure to serve as the radio operator for Maj. Cornelius Ram -- the finest company commander a Marine could wish for -- who perished while trying to save the lives of fellow Marines on Jan. 10, 1971, in an operation in Vietnam.

Two other Marine friends deserve mention here:

Leon Daniel, a veteran of the Chosin Reservoir campaign in Korea. Leon then went on to a long career covering wars (and the civil rights movement) for UPI.

He served as the last UPI bureau chief in Vietnam, and instead of bugging out with other reporters when the North entered Saigon on April 30, 1975, Leon stayed on for close to a month and continued to report until the new management booted him out of the country.

Leon served as a guide, mentor and true pal during the decade he and I lived on the Hill.

Lewis B. Puller Jr., author of the Pulitzer Prize winning biography Fortunate Son, whom I met at the Home Box Office "Welcome Home Concert" on July 4, 1987, at the now defunct Cap Center. He extended the hand of friendship in the spirit of "Semper Fidelis" until his deah in 1994.

Lew, quite simply, touched me with grace.

Army

My Army Vietnam veteran buddy, Dennis Shaw, asked me to give "a good thought to the boys of Recon Platoon, Echo Company, 1st of the 20th Infantry Battalion, 11th Brigade, Americal Division, near Duc Pho, Quang Nai Province."

Done Dennis - and yes, we were boys.

Dennis continues his service today by working with soldiers from the current war suffering from traumatic brain injury at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

I also need to give a nod to my friend George Wright, an Army Grenada veteran who now works in the Army's public affairs shop in the Pentagon, and serves as a valuable sounding board for this sometimes cranky reporter.

Navy

Capt. Dave Wray, commander of the Joint Public Affairs Support Element in Suffolk, Va., whom I have known for more than 20 years and has done two ground tours in Iraq.

Dave, like George Wright, provides me with some good compass headings so I don't veer off track.

And, since the Pentagon is a midsized village, Dave, Lew Puller and I had lunch together at least once a month for more than five years.

State Department

Abigail Friedman

I have known - and loved - Abigail Friedman, a State Department Foreign Service officer working with provincial reconstruction teams out of Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan, and her husband Eric Passaglia, for more than two decades and salute them both for their service.

Abigail gets a well deserved "hooah" for her work in Afghanistan, and Eric gets another for the equally tough job of taking care of the kids, Martha, Abe and Sam.

Family

Finally - because service in my family is generational - a salute to my father, Walter Brewin, who served in the Army Air Corps in the Philippines and Okinawa in World War II and my father-in-law, William Suess, a tin-can sailor in both the Atlantic and Pacific in The Big One.

Your Honor Roll

Do you have anyone you want to honor? Send in names, dates and branch of service and I'll post them here.

Ask anyone to identify America's first black aviators, and they would undoubtedly cite the famed Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, including Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr., who went on to become the first African American Air Force General.

But, as I just found out after reading Charles Glass' Americans in Paris, a fascinating account of Americans caught in Paris after the German occupation of Paris in 1940, the honor of the first black aviator goes to Eugene Jacques Bullard. Raised in Columbus, Ga., he moved to Europe to escape prejudice before the start of World War I.

Bullard joined the French Foreign Legion when World War I broke out, served in the French Army's 170th Infantry Regiment, was wounded twice at the battle of Verdun, and was awarded France's highest military honor, the Croix de Guerre.

While recuperating in Paris in 1916, Bullard took a bet from a fellow American that he could not get into the fledging French Air Force. He won the bet, and after training, in August 1917, started flying patrols in a Spad biplane through the end of the war on Nov. 11, according to Narayan Sengupta in an excerpt from his book American Eagles, a history of American aviators in World War I.

After the war, Bullard settled in Paris, opened a jazz club and in the 1930s was recruited by French intelligence to spy on Germans who frequented the club. In June 1940, as the Germans neared Paris, the 45-year-old Ballard hiked to the edge of the city to join his old French ground unit, the 170th Infantry Regiment, to help repel the German advance.

In 1954, French President Charles de Gaulle honored Ballard's service by asking him, along with two French veterans, to light the flame at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He died in 1961, with his service all but forgotten.

As we get ready to honor on Memorial Day all Americans who have answered the call to defend liberty, it's good to remember the motto Ballard painted on his biplane: "All Blood Runs Red."

As we get ready to honor those who served and died for this country on Memorial Day, the New Mexico Department of Veterans' Services will take care of some forgotten veterans: those who died with no known family to bury them.

Through its Forgotten Heroes Burial Program, the department -- in cooperation with the Veterans Affairs Department, the Santa Fe National Cemetery and New Mexico's 33 counties -- has stepped up to become the "family" of these servicemen ignored in death.

Ray Seva, spokesman for the veterans' services department, said it became aware of the issue this year after Thaddeus Lucero, the manager for Bernalillo County, informed them that no family member had stepped forward to claim the remains of 14 veterans despite repeated attempts by the county and its medical investigator office to locate relatives.

John Garcia, the secretary at veterans' services, said unclaimed remains of veterans are a national problem. "It's extremely disheartening to hear that there are thousands of unclaimed cremated remains of veterans nationwide," he said.

Seva told me that the 14 veterans will be buried with full military honors on June 4 at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. They are:

Charles Walker Curlee, Army
Patrick Faudi, Air Force, Korean War
Wesley D. Fontaine, Army
John Thomson, Marines
Carl N. Peterson, Navy, Korean War
Howard Fried, Army, WW II
Patrick Ford, Air Force
Donald K. James, Army, Vietnam War
Clovis Walker, Air Force
Lonny Douglas Greg, Navy, Vietnam War
Norman Stiver, Air Force, Vietnam War
Carleton Crouch, Air Force, Vietnam War
William Bailly, branch and date of service unknown
John Mercado, branch and date of service unknown

Garcia said, "All fallen veterans deserve to be treated with respect because they sacrificed to serve and protect our country. We are now pleased to be able to do this for those veterans who have been forgotten in the end."

As I observed last week, the Defense Department just this month decided to start developing a Web site to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War, which is this year.

Since Defense just began the contract process three months into the anniversary year, me thinks the year could end before it's launched.

Rather than complaining (as I last week) that this lackadaisical approach typifies treatment of Vietnam Veterans I have seen since returning home from service with the Marine Corps in the I Corps in 1966, I have a modest suggestion: Let's launch a companion site or maybe a Facebook page. (By the way, Defense was not this laggard in commemorating the 50th anniversary of World War II in 1995, with many celebration plans in the works.)

I don't think this will be hard, take too long and a do-it-ourselves effort could result in a site that resonates with vets as well as the rest of the country.

All we need is someone to host the site, a good Web designer and folks to tell the story in multiple ways, including photos, narratives, poetry, music and art. There are literally thousands of unit histories on the Web, and I envision this Web site as the ultimate index to those histories.

I'm interested in your comments on thus suggestion, and if you're serious about putting the commemoration into the hands of vets, e-mail me at bbrewin@nextgov.com

It turns out that on March 21 as I and 5,000 military and civilian folks participated in the 21st Annual Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., we had some company at the Army's Camp Arifjan in Kuwait.

Lt. Col. Jonathan Allen, a spokesman for the Third Army in Kuwait, told me that the event at Camp Arifjan attracted 255 marchers, including Navy Cmdr. Sherri Santos, a niece of a Bataan Death March survivor and a nurse at the Expeditionary Medical Facility in Kuwait.

Sherri Santos, a nurse at the Expeditionary Medical Facility in Kuwait.

Santos' uncle, Sgt. First-Class Isaias Ladia was captured by the Japanese Army in the spring of 1942 in the Bataan jungle, starving and without ammunition. After surrendering, he and 75,000 Filipinos and Americans marched some 60 miles to POW camps, with about 18,000 killed or having died of other causes such as exhaustion or disease along the way.

After the war, Ladia returned to his home town of Cagayan, Philippines, and then moved to the United States in 1982 -- free of the bitterness he had carried since Bataan -- and died in 1994.

Santos sported a Philippine flag on her 35-pound pack along with an inscription honoring her uncle, whose spirit, for a few hours, lived on almost 5,000 miles from Bataan.

Due to the lack of space at Camp Arifjan, the memorial march was only 12.5 miles, but unlike the 26.2- or 15.5-mile White Sands event, all marchers had to carry a 35 pound pack instead of choosing to go without one.

Capt. Katey Schrumm, the Third Army dietician, came in first overall in the Kuwait March, with her time of 1:32:50. She said she focused on the suffering of the soldiers on the death march to get past her pain threshold and then for added motivation, she said she focused on the fact that this is Women's History Month. Finally, true to her occupation, Schrumm also drew inspiration from the fact that this is also National Nutrition Month.

Capt. Katey Schrumm

On March 29, a statue depicting a kneeling soldier paying homage to a fallen comrade will be dedicated at the New Mexico Veterans' Memorial adjacent to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

The statue, funded by Chapter 318 of the Vietnam Veterans of America in Albuquerque, was created by George Salas, an Army Vietnam Veteran, who described the two-year project as "a labor of love."

Salas, a self-taught sculptor who served in Vietnam in from 1968 to 1969, called his work on the statue cathartic because it rekindled memories of the war. But it ended up as a truly healing process.

And 50 years after the start of the war Vietnam vets still need some healing.

Bob carrying a 45-pound pack

This Sunday, as my buddy Paul McCloskey, editor of Government Health IT, and I passed mile marker six on the Bataan Memorial Death March at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico we passed a young soldier toting an enormous rucksack. He was limping, favoring his left leg.

I asked him how he was doing, and like any 19-year-old trooper, he, of course, told me he had no problem -- limp notwithstanding.

Paul and I marched on for about 50 yards, when my Marine training to never leave a wounded comrade behind clicked in. I told Paul I had to go back and help. I suggested to the young soldier, who told me his name was Alex, that I carry his pack until we come to the next aid station. If he didn't let me take his pack, I told him, he could cause more damage to his ankle.

Alex, who told me that he serves in the Indiana National Guard and is a freshman at Purdue University, at first hesitated, but then relented, and gave me his pack.

Paul helped me put the pack on -- and I almost fell under the weight. Even though the rules for the "heavy" division on the Memorial March requires a 35-pound load, my 19-year-old pal had decided to tote 45 pounds. It seems Alex packed water and food that he planned to consume, and he did not want to come in light at the finish line.

Now, I used to carry a 43-pound AN/PRC-41 ground-to-air radio when I, too, was 19 years old and serving in Vietnam. But Alex's 45-pound load sure seemed heavier than I remembered.

When we finally made it to the aid station, I dropped the pack and turned Alex over to a field nurse. She suggested I take a break, which I did. I then went back to check on Alex. The nurse told me he had decided to continue the march, which meant he and I would part ways because Alex was walking the 26.2 mile route and I was on the 15 mile trail. The two routes split at this aid station.

I told the nurse I was concerned about Alex, as I was once young, macho and stupid. The nurse told me that, based on her observation, I had managed to overcome the young part in that equation.

The whole experience with Alex reinforced the key reason I have done the Memorial March the past two years: It's not about winning; it's about the true camaraderie that comes from a shared, tough experience with 5,000 other folks that honors those who were abused on that original Death March during World War II.

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M. -- I had the privilege on Sunday of participating for the second time in the annual Bataan Memorial Death March here at this sprawling Army military installation that occupies much of New Mexico south of the small city of Alamogordo.

As I did last year, I had the opportunity to meet the few remaining survivors of the original death march, which occurred in the Philippines in April 1942.

Some folks consider the event just another marathon, but for those of us who once answered the call to arms, this memorial march is exactly that -- a chance to reflect and remember, while putting one foot after another on an often grueling coarse.

As each of 5,000 marchers here left the assembly area on the main post, we passed by a line of survivors of the original march, such as 90-year-old Phillip Coon of Okemah, Okla., who shook the outstretched hands of all 5,000 of those marchers.

At the midpoint of the march, we met Philippine veterans again, their outstretched hands providing a boost to momentarily flagging spirits, and finally at the finish line, our hands met, a brief electric touch across generations of service.

I also touched part of my history, walking part of the way with Dan, a Marine from West Virginia, who lost a leg at An Hoa in Vietnam in 1967. He seemed to be doing better on the desert slog on his one leg and prosthesis than I was doing on my two original limbs.

I also encountered and touched soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Marines marveled at the fast moving team from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and they exchanged guten tag with what seemed to be at least 100 German soldiers across the course of the march.

Through it all, the spirit of comradeship and camaraderie prevailed -- words and sentiments that may seem hokey, but ones that flourished for a few brief hours here.

Those words also applied to the 4H Club at the base, which staffed the final water point at the finish line and put up posters of encouragement, providing a lift to tired muscles.

The memorial march is also a great equalizer. David Huntoon may wear three stars as the director of the Army Staff, but on the course he was just another soldier putting one foot in front of the other for 26.2 miles. He finished that stretch in roughly six hours - the amount of time it took me to do just 15.2 miles. (I figure I'm about 10 years older than Huntoon.)

The Army, especially the folks who organize the march here, deserve a heartfelt "Hooah" for once again getting it right.