Hundreds gather to honor the fallen

MAT-SU — Clear, blue skies and bright sunshine greeted veterans and those who wished to honor them Monday at the Veterans Wall of Honor.

Keynote speaker James Hastings noted how fortuitous that was after a weekend that brought the first big rains of summer.

“I think the Lord blessed us, because yesterday he scared the socks off of us,” he said.

Hastings, who sits on the governor’s Veterans Advisory Council and is co-director of the veterans outreach group Alaska’s Healing Hearts, said he’d spent the weekend with a group of vets hunting bears.

“You see a lot of people up there in the woods running around, and not a gall-darned one of them knows what the weekend is all about, except running around and making a mess out of everything,” he said.

That theme — making Memorial Day less of a party weekend and more of what it was designed to be, a day to honor veterans — was repeated throughout the day.

Jesse Sawyer, vice commander of the American Legion Post 15, who led the proceedings, said it was an act of Congress that put Memorial Day on a Monday rather than tied to a specific date.

“Changing the date merely to create a three-day weekend has changed the meaning of the day,” Sawyer said.

Some in Congress, he said, have recognized that, trying on multiple occasions to change Memorial Day from the last Monday in May to some specific date.

“Please write your representatives and your senators urging them to support this bill,” Sawyer said.

But even if society at large sees the holiday as only that, a holiday, at least multiple hundreds of people who constituted the crowd at Monday’s Valley ceremony certainly don’t.

State Sen. Linda Menard, R-Wasilla, said that this commitment to honoring those who served is what makes America great.

“The United States of America is the most phenomenal place on earth because right now there are millions of people across America who are honoring this day,” she said.

Hastings said his career in the military began with remembering his grandfather, a veteran of World War I, who helped man a “water-cooled, mule-drawn machine gun” in that conflict.

“I hold that man solely responsible for my 21 years of military service,” Hastings said.

His grandfather inspired him to join up and to stick with it. Each time he had to make a decision in his military career, whether to stay in or get out, he’d visit grandpa’s grave and talk it over with him.

What his grandfather’s example taught him, Hastings said, was “the value of taking your turn.”

And the value of service.

“Whether you ever put on a uniform or not, you serve,” he said. “If everyone had a uniform on it would be awful hard to get a burger around town.”

Service means service both to your country and to your fellow man, he said. Sometimes that just means the guys in the trenches next to you.

“It’s not always the flag that’s on your mind,” Hastings said. “Sometimes it’s the last thing on your mind, but it’s always there.”

John Teamer, deputy director of Veterans Affairs for the state of Alaska, said he was a recent addition to the department, having retired out of the military in December and hired on in March.

In the military, he said, he served the troops and now, “I get the honor, distinguished honor, to take care of our veterans.”

He thanked the servicemen and women as well as their spouses and children who do without their loved ones during long deployments.

Teamer read Gov. Sean Parnell’s proclamation in honor of Memorial Day, who noted that Alaska is blessed to have so many military men and women “serving not only in uniform, but as pillars of our Alaskan communities.”

Tech. Sgt. Tim Reed with the U.S. Air Force arrived in uniform to read another proclamation, but first said a few words on his own behalf.

“My son would be here today, but he is currently assigned overseas,” he said, receiving applause in return.

Reed read President Barack Obama’s proclamation, which spoke of military members who broke free from the British Empire, held a fragile union together, “rolled back the creeping tide of tyranny” and took on the threat of terrorism.

“Their legacy lives on in all of us,” Obama wrote.

Hastings urged everyone to say a prayer of thanks to all of those military members.

“You might not have a floor to put a knee on if someone hadn’t gone to defend your freedom for you,” he said.

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.