"For the ILWU, the Merchant Mariners, and for the old fishermen, that's sacred ground down there," Greg Mitre of the ILWU Pensioners said of the memorial site.
"For the ILWU, the Merchant Mariners, and for the old fishermen, that's sacred ground down there," Greg Mitre of the ILWU Pensioners said of the memorial site.
"For the ILWU, the Merchant Mariners, and for the old fishermen, that's sacred ground down there," Greg Mitre of the ILWU Pensioners said of the memorial site.
Labor of love behind Southwest Florida Vietnam Veterans Memorial
For almost 50 years, Vietnam has been etched into Charles Reed’s life.
And now he wants to help leave an indelible and historical mark to honor those who fought in the war.
Reed is working on two projects. Gary Bowler, president of the Veterans Midpoint Memorial Charitable Trust, his wife Judy, Stuart Berman of North Fort Myers and Renalto Camelio of Cape Coral all have been working with Reed.
For 11 years, Reed worked on finding photos of the original 80 fallen Vietnam veterans from Lee, Collier, Charlotte, Hendry and Glades counties whose names are on the Southwest Florida Vietnam Veterans Memorial. He then worked on the rest of the fallen veterans for the State of Florida. He then started working on the original 80 pictures/bios from a simple picture and a story to now include each individual person s medals, ribbons, badges, unit patches and rank, which took a year to complete.
Even Richard Nixon Knew He d Done Wrong
January 21, 2021
Sometime in the night there’d been rain, a cold front in from the Atlantic. But by morning all that was gone. The clouds thinned into a blue unbroken chain, and the sunrise came on, first in the Washington Monument and then against the Kennedy Center and the Capitol dome; a swift, intermittent dawn that brightened the Potomac with clear winter light.
Since daybreak I’d been standing at the foot of the Navy and Merchant Marine Memorial on the Virginia side of the river. Snowplows blocked the bridges. The National Mall and surrounding streets were closed. 25,000 soldiers patrolled everything. Two weeks earlier, on January 6, a crowd of white supremacists, QAnon conspiracists, militia, misogynist brotherhoods, and other Trump supporters had led an insurrection against Congress attempting to silence the votes of 81 million Americans with violence and even though I’d witnessed it firsthand, I still found myself marveling da