Cold War Veterans Blog

These NH veterans never forget

By SHAWNE K. WICKHAM

New Hampshire Sunday News Staff
Sunday, Jun. 15, 2008

MEREDITH – For two decades, they've kept the faith.

Now, with another generation of young warriors fighting in foreign lands, they are challenging the rest of us to do the same.

It was 20 years ago this summer that three Vietnam veterans from the Lakes Region made a solemn pledge to remember those they believed the nation had forgotten: American prisoners of war and those missing in action.

Bob Jones and Russ Dunn, both of Meredith, and Marty Carney of North Sandwich met in lakeside Hesky Park on a summer evening and stood in silent vigil, holding the solemn black POW/MIA and the American flag.

"Maybe we can start a fire in New Hampshire -- that was the whole idea," recalls Jones.

They and others who followed have kept that vigil every Thursday evening since. That's more than 1,000 evenings, in all sorts of weather conditions.

"Sometimes in the dead of winter, it would be just the three of us," Carney said.

This Thursday's 7 p.m. vigil coincides with the 15th annual Freedom Ride, held during Bike Week to honor POW/MIAs.

Paul Lessard, a veteran and a Harley enthusiast, had been to the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, D.C., on Memorial Day weekend back in 1993, and came home determined to start a New Hampshire ride to remember the missing. That first year, he recalled, nearly 100 riders participated; this year, he's hoping for thousands.

"We still have service men and women who are missing, killed in action, and their bodies have never been returned," Lessard said. "Their families have never had closure, and it's happening even today in Iraq."

"It's all nice and good to have support and to have those little ribbons on our cars. But if we're not accountable ... for the people who sacrificed themselves to go over there ... what are we saying about ourselves?"

Jones says he wants to "clog traffic" on Thursday, drawing enough people to force elected officials to deal with the POW/MIA issue this year -- a year that finds a former prisoner of war running for President. For Jones, it's an "issue of faith and trust."

Numbers can make a difference, he insists. "When you have three or four people standing there, you've got to be a little bit crazy. When there's three or four thousand, you can't all be crazy."

How it started

The original idea of the vigil was simple: To stand for one minute for every year since then-President Richard Nixon declared in 1973 that there were no remaining POWs left behind in Southeast Asia.

This past Thursday, a small group stood for 35 minutes in what Jones believes is the longest-held weekly vigil in the nation's history. "We never expected to be there for 20 years," said Jones.

POW/MIA Vigil and Freedom Ride

When: Thursday, June 19, 7 p.m.

Where: Hesky Park, Route 3, Meredith

Details: Bikers should be at Lowe's,1407 Lake Shore Road (formerly K-Mart Plaza), Gilford, by 6 p.m. Lineup is at 6:15 p.m., and the 11-mile ride will set out with police escort down Route 3 to Hesky Park at 6:30 p.m. Drivers can take Exit 23 off I-93, and follow Route 104 east to Route 3 north into Meredith.

Information: Northeast POW/MIA Network -- geocities.com/powmianortheastnhnet.

But they have been, although some got discouraged over the years, including Carney, who stopped attending 13 years ago.

"It was frustrating," Carney said. "I just felt -- and still do -- Americans went on with their daily lives and forgot about the over 2,000 at the time prisoners of war that were left behind."

For veterans who came home from Vietnam knowing they left comrades behind, the pain is still fresh.

Whenever Carney is in Washington, D.C., he visits the Vietnam War Memorial, and traces the names of missing friends on that black granite wall. "It's 40-plus years. They were 18, 19, 20, 21 years old," he said. "It just sucks the life out of you when you think about it."

Carney, an Army paratrooper in Vietnam from 1966 to 1967, believes that was such a painful period in American history that "people chose to forget rather than to remember."

Health problems have kept Russ Dunn, one of the original three, from attending the vigils lately. But on Thursday, he said, "I'll be in a wheelchair, and I'm going to be there, one way or another."

Dunn said he never expected what they started would still be going on 20 years later. But, he said, "We won't quit. We won't go away."

Mass. MIA

And now there are new Americans missing in foreign lands. The Department of Defense lists three service members as missing in action in the current war in Iraq, including Spc. Alex Jimenez of Lawrence, Mass.

Jimenez's father, Andrew Jimenez, will be at Hesky Park Thursday evening.

Bob Jones is one of three Vietnam veterans who pledged 20 years ago not to forget POW/MIAs. In 1988, they started a weekly vigil in Hesky Park in Meredith that has taken place every Thursday since. (BRUCE PRESTON/UNION LEADER)

Jimenez, 25, and Pvt. Byron Fouty, 19, of Waterford, Mich., disappeared a year ago after a firefight south of Baghdad. The body of a fellow soldier was later pulled from the Euphrates River. According to published reports, Jimenez' Army ID and weapon were later found but no trace of the soldier has turned up.

Bob Jones, who served as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam in 1966-67, wants Granite Staters to show Jimenez his son has not been forgotten. Not here.

"Instead of telling him that we care, let's show this father just how much we care about him, his family, his son and all the other families and troops," Jones said.

For families like these, he said, "every day is Memorial Day."

Making it official

In April, the remains of Keith "Matt" Maupin were returned to his family in Ohio, four years after the then-20-year-old Army private was captured in Iraq.

Meeting Maupin's mother three years ago inspired Holly Tetreault of Meredith to push to make Hesky Park an official state POW/MIA memorial. A Navy mom, Tetreault heard Carolyn Maupin speak about her missing son at the POW/MIA vigil during Bike Week, and felt compelled to shake her hand.

"I just have not, to this day, been able to shake the look in that woman's face," she said. "To think she had no idea whether her son was cold, if he was hungry, if he was sick, if they were hurting him. She had no idea."

The missing, war by war

The Department of Defense estimates there are 88,000 American service members who are missing from wars dating back to World War II. The majority of those are World War II veterans who are unaccounted for but considered deceased, including many who are "buried as unknowns in cemeteries around the world," according to Capt. Mary Olsen of the DOD's POW/Missing Personnel Office in Washington, D.C.

World War II: Approximately 78,000

Korean War: Approximately 8,100

Vietnam: 1,759

Cold War (end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall): 125

Gulf War I (1991): 3 (including two "over-water losses")

Iraq War: 3

For more on missing service personnel, including the names of those from New Hampshire, visit: www.dtic.mil/dpmo.

Tetreault's stepson, Michael, designed a plaque for the Hesky Park memorial, and the local American Legion Auxiliary paid for its installation.

The next step was asking lawmakers to designate the area as the state POW/MIA memorial.

A bill sponsored by State Sen. Deb Reynolds and others sailed through the Senate earlier this year, but stalled after the House changed its wording to acknowledge Hesky Park as "a" memorial, not "the" state memorial.

At the request of the bill's sponsors, Gov. John Lynch and the Executive Council voted unanimously earlier this month to accept the Hesky Park stone and flagpole as a gift from the Town of Meredith, and to recognize it as "New Hampshire's original POW/MIA memorial."

Karen Thurston of Gilford is president of the New Hampshire chapter of Blue Star Mothers, an organization of military families that supports the annual Freedom Ride and weekly POW/MIA vigils. Blue Stars represent those who are serving or have served, Gold Stars those who die in war.

Thurston said it was only when her own son, Alex, an Army National Guardsman, was deployed to Iraq in 2004 that she thought about the pain felt by the parents of missing servicemen: "There but for the grace of God go I."

Now, whenever she attends an event honoring the troops, Thurston said, "We always say please take a moment to remember that mother who hasn't had closure and would love to have her child come home.

"A POW family is still a Blue Star family," Thurston said. "They don't become a Gold Star until (their deceased sons or daughters) are returned."

National aspirations

For organizers of these events, there's a new urgency to the POW/MIA issue these days, with American warriors again in harm's way.

Lessard hopes the bikers who attend this year's Freedom Ride will be inspired to push for answers at long last. "And then take that message home with you, and hold these politicians ... accountable for our people.

"You want to send these men and women overseas to fight, and that's all well and good, but what about the fact they need to be brought home too? Why aren't we making sure they get home?"

Jones said that, early on, it was anger that kept him going back to Hesky Park every week. "Now it's focus," he said. "It's persistence."

He wants the families of POW/MIAs to know this: "We're never going to walk away."

Tetreault said she'll ask New Hampshire's congressional delegation to help make the Meredith site a national landmark.

But, more important, she said, "I would like to see this be the time that we as a country learn from our past -- and make this the war we bring them all home."