Honoring Vietnam vets
By Linda Lemmon
Town Crier Editor
The Danielson Veterans Coffeehouse last week honored Vietnam veterans on a 50th anniversary of the war’s end, complete with a cake, patches, pins and a program on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
More than 100 attended, served breakfast by the Putnam Lodge of Elks.
Veteran Ron Pariseau’s program on the Vietnam era started with the start of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. He explained how Maya Lin, a 21-year old Yale University architecture student won the competition with her black granite memorial design. It was dedicated in 1982.
The design is meant to symbolize the closing and healing of a wound.
The granite came from India and was cut in Vermont. At its highest point the monument is 10 feet tall. It’s 246 feet long on each of its two sides with 70 separate inscribed granite panels. There are four panels on each end without names. The land given for the monument could not support the weight of the stone, he said, so there are 140 concrete pylons that go down into bedrock to support the monument.
The casualties — the youngest was 15 and the oldest was 63. One-hundred twenty listed its foreign countries as their home of record. Veterans killed on the first day numbered 997. Veterans killed on the last day of the conflict were 1,448. The total number of names on the memorial is in the mid-58,000s.
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