Published: November 25, 2009 01:54 pm      

Boone County “welcomes home” Vietnam veterans

The atmosphere in the Boone County Courthouse rotunda was heavy with emotion Tuesday evening, Nov. 10, as Vietnam veterans, families, friends and supporters crowded together to finally welcome home these veterans properly, perhaps for the first time ever.

The Vietnam War was a 1959-1975 conflict in which more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers died. At the ceremony, Mayor Huck Lewis shared statistics that of the nearly 3 million Americans who served in the war, less than 850,000 are alive today, the youngest at 54 years of age. The average age of those killed was 23.1 years.

Guest speaker Tim Barnes talked about his time serving in the Vietnam War, saying he thought they had dropped him in the “hinges of hell.” He thought he was going to die, hearing tiny tree branches cracking in front of his face from the bullets.

Barnes had heard that people in America were calling the soldiers in Vietnam baby killers, he said, and spitting on them. But when he returned to the states, he didn’t experience any of that. But he also didn’t get one “thank you.”

“My friends asked me where I’d been, and I said, ‘What?’” Barnes said with astonishment. “I’ve been to hell and back.

“This (ceremony) is the best thing anyone can do for a veteran — say ‘thank you,’” he said.

Keynote speaker Lt. Catheryne Pully’s father served in the Vietnam War. In preparation to speak at the ceremony, Pully said she asked her father what he wished he would have heard upon returning home from Vietnam.

His answer, she said, was “You did a good job.”

“You’ve been given too little recognition by your country, but you’ve handled it well because that’s what warriors do,” Pully said. “But you did a very, very good job.”

The Vietnam veterans in attendance were asked to come to the front and share their name and time of service. Roughly 50 local veterans lined up.

Terri Batts, mother of the Boone County soldier Joey Strong who was killed in action in Iraq Dec. 2006, read the names of the 12 Boone County soldiers killed in the Vietnam War. Family members of those who died in service stood to be recognized.