[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 98 (Monday, June 18, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1319-E1320]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




    COMMEMORATING THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL WALL

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. RICHARD E. NEAL

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                         Monday, June 18, 2007

  Mr. NEAL of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, I would like to take a 
moment to reflect upon the events of 25 years ago and to remember the 
tremendous sacrifice a generation of veterans and their families made 
for our country at that time.
  58,256 names are engraved on the black granite walls of the Vietnam 
Memorial Wall here in Washington, DC to honor America's war dead of a 
generation ago. The stories of these individuals and their families 
make our hearts ache today and will never be forgotten.
  Jo-Ann Moriarty, a reporter from The Republican newspaper in 
Springfield, MA, compiled a series of stories this Memorial Day about 
Vietnam veterans from Western Massachusetts that touches upon their 
experience while serving our country. Their stories are remarkably 
similar to those being told by the brave men and women serving in Iraq 
and Afghanistan today. Sharing this history is critically important so 
that we never forget the serious impact of war.
  I would like to submit the first two pieces of Jo-Ann Moriarty's 
series into the Congressional Record today for others to enjoy, and to 
thank veterans from Massachusetts and across America for their service 
to our country.

                  [From the Republican, May 27, 2007]

                Raw Emotions Surface at Vietnam Memorial

                          (By Jo-Ann Moriarty)

       At each end of the Vietnam Memorial Wall, the black granite 
     rises only 8 inches above the earth--ankle high.
       But, with each step forward, visitors find themselves 
     sinking deeper and deeper into a well of names--tens of 
     thousands of names of America's young men--engraved on a 
     stone wall that, at its center, towers 10 feet.
       For many veterans of the Vietnam War, it feels as if they 
     are descending into an abyss. It can be suffocating.
       All those names etched into the wall take one's breath 
     away. They find themselves drowning in memories and images of 
     buddies and brothers they loved and lost.
       Marine Corps Capt. Daniel M. Walsh III, now the director of 
     veteran affairs for the city of Springfield, had his 
     sergeant, Leonard A. Hultquist, die in his arms during combat 
     just moments before he, himself, was struck by a bullet.
       Under fire, Army Cpl. Heriberto Flores, who is today the 
     head of the New England Farm Workers Council in Springfield, 
     was a door gunner aboard a UH-1 Huey helicopter when he saw 
     his friend from Springfield, Army Spc. Paul E. Bonnette, hit 
     by enemy fire. He was 21.
       This marks the 25th anniversary year of ``the wall,'' a 
     long, thin line of black granite that stretches 246.9 feet 
     along the National Mall. Nestled into the landscape below the 
     lofty monuments that honor George Washington and Abraham 
     Lincoln, it is the nation's memorial to its war dead in 
     Vietnam.
       It was designed by Maya Lin, an Asian-American, at the age 
     of 21 while she was still an undergraduate at Yale 
     University.
       It bears 58,256 names.
       It took a decade after its building before Walsh, Flores or 
     Springfield attorney Frederick A. Hurst could make their 
     visits. Hurst's youngest brother, Army Spc. Ronald C. Hurst, 
     was killed April 12, 1967, when the Jeep he was driving 
     struck a landmine in Vietnam.
       ``It was emotional,'' said Flores, who ultimately first 
     visited the monument with his wife, Grace.
       Hurst stenciled his brother's name during his visit. ``It 
     was tough,'' he recalled recently.
       Walsh only went because he was engineered there by three of 
     his young sons, one of whom became a Marine and all of whom 
     wanted to know their father's history.
       ``I never had any intention of going to see it,'' Walsh 
     said. ``We lost a lot of people. A lot of people were hurt. A 
     lot of bad things happened.''
       The wall holds the names of guys with whom Walsh shared 
     foxholes and who were friends from Holy Name School--like 
     Army Sgt. Walter ``Buddy'' J. Fitzpatrick, of Springfield, 
     killed in combat in South Vietnam on March 3, 1967, and Army 
     Lt. Bernard J. Lovett Jr., also of Springfield, whose tour of 
     duty in Vietnam began on July 22, 1970 and ended when he was 
     killed in action on Oct. 16, 1970 in Hua Nghia.
       Walsh knew and admired another Springfield friend, Marine 
     Capt. Ralph E. Hines, who was killed in combat on Feb. 19, 
     1967. He was 28.
       Oddly, when Walsh finally made it to the wall, he found the 
     unexpected.
       ``It was peaceful,'' Walsh said. ``The memories kept 
     flowing back, a lot were good, with the troops.''
       In Vietnam, Flores saw duty aboard Huey helicopters, 
     dropping infantrymen in the field in the morning and 
     collecting them in the afternoon. He would notice fresh faces 
     among the troops and pray they would make it back on the 
     helicopter by the end of the day. Some were waiting in body 
     bags.
       To Flores, the wall is validation.
       ``I think it is closing the circle,'' Flores said. 
     ``Certain lessons we've learned. The nation has honored us. 
     For so many years, we were losers. And now, people realize we 
     were soldiers.''
       Those soldiers were in a no-win situation as Vietnam 
     devolved into a civil war where the enemy and the innocent 
     were hard to distinguish. Army infantrymen and Marines snaked 
     through the jungles, going from hilltop to hilltop, moving 
     constantly while the Navy patrolled seemingly endless rivers 
     and the Air Force and Army flight crews performed missions 
     from above. Vietnam was a place of guerilla warfare and 
     underground tunnels, where everyone--man, woman or child--
     could be the enemy, or not.
       There was the My Lai massacre, in which American soldiers 
     killed hundreds of innocents, and back home anti-war 
     protestors chanted outside of President Lyndon B. Johnson's 
     White House, ``Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill 
     today.''
       ``Anyone there was a loser,'' said Westfield native 
     Benjamin Sadowski Jr., the son of a survivor of the famed 
     World War II Battle of the Bulge, who survived his own combat 
     tour in Vietnam.
       Up north in the tiny Franklin County town of Shelburne 
     Falls, which had a population of about 2,600 at the time, 
     families grieved the loss of four of their sons in Vietnam.
       Altogether, from the four counties of Western 
     Massachusetts, the Vietnam War claimed 200 casualties, 50 in 
     the city of Springfield alone.
       ``Two of my best buddies, plus my brother,'' said John E. 
     ``Jack'' Palmeri, whose brother James E. ``Jimmy'' Palmeri 
     died 11 days after being hit by mortar fire on Feb. 26, 1967. 
     He was 20.
       Jack Palmeri, who enlisted in the Army and was sent to 
     Germany, had advised his younger brother to do the same. 
     ``But Jimmy said, `I can't stand the military for three 
     years. I'll take my chances.' ''
       While others shed their uniforms when returning home from 
     services, Jack Palmeri wore his home in honor of his brother 
     and his friends, Army Spc. Ronald E. Wissman, killed at age 
     20 in action on May 21, 1967, and Marine Capt. Paul T. 
     Looney, a helicopter pilot shot down on May 10, 1967.
       For those who returned home, he said, ``We were not 
     welcomed. The country was divided and Vietnam divided it.''
       In those days, there was sometimes no distinction between 
     the hatred of the Vietnam War and the U.S. troops who fought 
     there.
       The nation was torn apart by race riots. Anti-war 
     protesting students were caught up in the homefront violence 
     seen in the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and 
     Robert F. Kennedy in 1968.
       Kennedy, running a presidential campaign on the promise of 
     getting out of Vietnam, was shot dead in June. Months after 
     his killing, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was 
     engulfed in violence in the streets--the Chicago cops beating 
     the long-haired protesters who had gathered to demonstrate 
     against the war in Vietnam.
       There were the killings of four students at Kent State 
     University as they protested the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 
     1970, shot dead by Ohio National Guardsmen.
       There was Vietnam veteran and future U.S. senator John F. 
     Kerry in 1971 in combat fatigues testifying against the war 
     before the Senate Foreign Relations committee.
       And, the U.S. troops, fighting in a divided country half-
     way round the world, wound up returning home to another 
     divided country.
       It was a time of tumult and change, verging, at times on 
     chaos.
       Rock star Jimi Hendrix sang to the rage, pain, passion and 
     confusion of the nation's youth: ``Purple haze all in my 
     brain. Lately things just don't seem the same.''
       In Vietnam, New York banker Henry ``Hank'' Trickey was a 
     sergeant in ``Alpha'' Company of the Army's 101st Airborne 
     Division and was steps behind Springfield native Spc. Peter 
     F. Nolan when Nolan was hit by ambush fire, dead on May 8, 
     1970, at the age of 21.
       ``There was no front line,'' Trickey recalled recently. 
     ``Constant movement. You never knew what was in front of you. 
     You never knew if you would make it through the day.''
       Flores flew infantrymen in and out of battle zones every 
     day. Sometimes the drop was

[[Page E1320]]

     bad--sending the soldiers off to a set-up by the enemy. 
     Sometimes, the helicopters were under intense fire, and one 
     would go down or an American B-52 bomber would appear and 
     drop napalm.
       ``It was organized insanity,'' Flores said. ``People you 
     are defending are shooting at you.''
       A lot of the guys, like Flores, were high school drop-outs. 
     But blacks, whites and Latinos discovered among the rag-tag, 
     chain-smoking, beer-drinking fearless ranks a brotherhood 
     free from racism and filled with pure faith, courage and 
     valor.
       ``When we see each other, we say, `I love you, brother,' 
     and we really mean that,'' Flores said. ``I was proud to be 
     there. We did not choose the war; they sent us.''
       The wall which memorializes the dead from a war that once 
     divided the nation has become a source of comfort, a place 
     for mending.
       ``It is a healing thing,'' Palmeri said.
       Hurst, who views his brother's death as a waste of a life 
     that had so much promise, said he has found a peace at the 
     monument.
       ``My personal comfort came from the reaction the country 
     had to the wall,'' Hurst said. ``The wall brought a 
     resolution to the whole Vietnam thing.''
       Oklahoma resident Tommy Kellogg was steps behind 
     Springfield teenager Army Pfc. James A. Messer when Messer 
     was caught in an ambush.
       Messer, 18, a parachuter, had been recently recruited from 
     B Company of the 1st 327 Infantry Battalion of the 101st 
     Airborne to join Tiger Force. It was a fierce band of 45 
     soldiers on a new assignment with loose orders concerning 
     search and destroy missions in the jungle.
       Kellogg has not seen the wall. Nor has Hank Trickey.
       James Austreng, of Wisconsin, also hasn't been able to make 
     a visit to the wall. Yet, after all these years, he still 
     holds the memory of a 21-year-old from Westfield, James D. 
     Zebert.
       It was Zebert who provided cover for his squad--including 
     Austreng--only to be shot dead minutes later in Tay Ninh, 
     South Vietnam, on June 27, 1979. His tour had begun just 18 
     days earlier.
       The Army private who served under Capt. Steven J. Popkin, 
     of Springfield, still can visualize the Mohawk helicopter 
     pilot wearing his hat slightly askew.
       ``Capt. Popkin was one of the nicest guys all around. He 
     was a damn fine aviator,'' said Bruce Gaylord, who grew up in 
     Michigan. ``He didn't lord his rank over anyone. He would 
     never make a joke about someone else. He had a rich sense of 
     humor and a wonderful laugh.''
       ``He was a good officer, the kind of guy you would follow 
     into hell,'' Gaylord said.
       But not to the nation's capital.
       ``I could never bring myself to it,'' Gaylord said.

                  [From the Republican, May 28, 2007]

                Vietnam Green Beret Made Chicopee Proud

                          (By Jo-Ann Moriarty)

       What can you say about a 24-year-old man whose name is 
     among 58,256 on the Vietnam War Memorial?
       That he was the platoon leader in Bravo Company.
       That every day he assigned someone from the squad to watch 
     over ``Mouse.''
       That he and his grunts, strapped with M-16s, trailed a 
     jungle maze for weeks and fought for their lives as the young 
     lieutenant tried to pick their battles.
       Mark C. Rivest, of Chicopee, was an officer and gentleman.
       He was one of the famed ``Green Berets'' in the Army's 
     Special Forces, and he completed two tours in Vietnam as the 
     leader of a platoon which, for the most part, was composed 
     draftees, many of whom were high-school dropouts.
       A couple of guys in the band of 30 men should probably have 
     never been in the Army, let alone assigned into the deadly 
     terrain around Hue, a battle-scarred city just below the 
     North Vietnam border.
       ``He is a very hard person to forget,'' recalled Manhattan 
     businessman Anthony Loiero, who turned 21 in Vietnam and 
     served under Rivest between 1969 and 1970.
       ``One of the things I remember the most about him was that 
     he tried to keep us out of trouble,'' Loiero said. And, when 
     they went in for the fight, ``he would make sure that we were 
     all protected. He was concerned about the guys he was 
     responsible for. The jobs we were doing, he wanted to make 
     sure we were there to do them the next day.''
       The year before Rivest and most of his men arrived in 
     country, the Tet Offensive in 1968 ramped up the carnage and 
     particularly bloody was the battle for Hue.
       When Communist forces seized the city, they held the city 
     for 25 days ``committing ghastly atrocities during the 
     initial phase of their occupation,'' wrote Stanley Karnow in 
     his Pulitzer Prize-winning book: ``Vietnam. A History.''
       Back home, America was violent, too. Robert F. Kennedy and 
     Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated within months of 
     each other. America was at war with itself. That summer, 
     anti-war protesters were beaten by Chicago police as they 
     stormed the Democratic Convention.
       By 1969, when Rivest, who left behind his parents, Paul and 
     Catherine, two brothers and a sister in the Aldenville 
     section of Chicopee, and Loiero, an only child, who grew up 
     in the Italian enclave of West New York, N.J., where he still 
     lives, got to Vietnam, the death toll of American soldiers 
     and civilians--both in the North and South--was staggering.
       Before they met, Rivest had completed a six-month tour as 
     platoon leader and, instead of alternating to the rear, ``he 
     transferred into the field again at his request,'' Loiero 
     said.
       Rivest earned the confidence of the soldiers in his new 
     platoon almost immediately. Even-tempered, without bluster, 
     he was approachable and ruled by a shot from his dark eyes.
       He was college educated. He smoked Chesterfields, played 
     the piano and had something about him that Loiero still 
     associates with Louis Armstrong's song, ``What a Wonderful 
     World.''
       It took Loiero 13 years before he went to ``the wall'' in 
     Washington, D.C., to take in the full measure of the Vietnam 
     War's toll and tragedy, his delay mostly attributable to 
     seeing the actual engraving of his platoon leader's name.
       Now, middle-aged, Rivest's covenant to keep the men in his 
     platoon safe with his good judgment and keen skills is even 
     more precious to Loiero who came home, got a college degree, 
     has a successful graphic arts business and is happily married 
     with two children.
       ``We were a rag-tag bunch of good guys living every day 
     hoping that every one of us would live to go home that day.'' 
     Loiero said, adding that he still thinks ``about the way he 
     treated us. How he protected us. How his main objective was 
     to watch his gaggle of geese and to make sure we did the 
     right thing.''
       ``If we were in harm's way, he would be the first one out 
     there clearing the path,'' he added.
       Rivest made his platoon a band of brothers. And, he did it 
     in many ways, Loiero said.
       There were, for instance, specific orders that someone in 
     the squad watch over a guy nicknamed ``Mouse,'' and a couple 
     of other grunts, who Loiero said, ``should never have been in 
     the Army. Should never had been sent to Vietnam. And never 
     should have been in the infantry with the rest of us.''
       Rivest instilled a discipline for constant movement.
       The checklist was drilled into his men: Rifles cleaned. 
     Gear together. Who's got the gun flares. Teeth brushed. Boots 
     tied up. Who's watching ``Mouse'' today? Who's sleeping 
     first.
       ``Then you'd start all over,'' Loiero said. ``You make a 
     commitment to the guys next to you and they make it to you. 
     It is a brotherhood.''
       After their tour ended, Loiero went home. And Rivest, from 
     what Loiero has been able to piece together, returned to 
     Special Forces duty. The next assignment he accepted took him 
     into Laos where he was killed in ground combat on June 4, 
     1970.
       These days, Palmer resident Josh R. Morin, who once lived 
     across from the Rivest home on McKinstry Avenue in Chicopee, 
     carries the green beret of his boyhood friend to schools in 
     Western Massachusetts as he talks to students about U.S. 
     history and the Vietnam War.
       As boys, they played Army together with their younger 
     brothers.
       Morin had been to Vietnam and back before Rivest went, and 
     he warned his buddy against going because the terrain had 
     gotten so dangerous. Morin's combat buddy had been shot dead 
     inches from him.
       When Rivest was killed, Morin, married at the time but 
     living on the same street, said he couldn't go to the 
     funeral.
       ``I couldn't go to his funeral and face his mother and 
     father, the idea that I made it and he hadn't. I couldn't 
     deal with it and now I regret that,'' Morin said. ``I never 
     saw them again.''
       Someone in the family later entrusted Morin with Rivest's 
     green beret and his medals.

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