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BY BRIAN WILLIAMS
bwilliams@nwitimes.com
219.548.4348 | Wednesday, November 12, 2008 | (No comments posted.)
HEBRON | For more than three decades -- not until after the attacks of Sept. 11 -- Alan Van Dan, of Boone Grove, never got a thank you for his Army combat service in Vietnam.
Van Dan and other veterans got that and more in Veterans Day ceremonies on the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I on Tuesday at Hebron High School.
"Thanks for serving," senior Erica Ollom told old soldiers, sailors, flyers and Marines during the school's annual program.
Members of American Legion Post 190 posted the colors, Student Council President Stacy Blank led the Pledge of Allegiance and the school band performed service branch songs and other patriotic music.
Seated on folding chairs in the center of the school gymnasium, the veterans heard the high school choir perform "I Hear America Singing," a Walt Whitman-inspried medley of national music and quotations from the likes of Nathan Hale, Abraham Lincoln, Emma Lazarus, Ben Franklin and Dwight Eisenhower.
Eighth-grade math teacher Dan Lewandowski, a Vietnam era veteran, told of his grandfather who fought in World War I and his father who fought in World War II. Both were wounded, Lewandowski said, and he recalled his mother picking shrapnel out of his grandfather's leg years after the war.
Donald Roy, 61, an Army combat engineer in Vietnam, called the program "fantastic."
And he recalled a saying that a thank you is bigger than a medal.
"I appreciate that they do remember us," Roy said.
For Van Dan, who has suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder since his service as a combat rifleman in Vietnam in the 1960s, the program also was stirring.
"Any time I hear the music playing, I cry," Van Dan, 61, said. "If you were dead, you wouldn't be able to hear it. You celebrate it.
"I'd go back again for the country and fight for it anytime," he said, "because you don't know what freedom is until you lose it."
Van Dan's wife, LaVerna, also appreciated the program.
"This connects the veterans to the school and the community and that's important," she said. With their presence, the veterans passed concepts of duty and sacrifice on to the students, she said.
"Someday it will be their turn," she said.
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