Fallen veterans remembered at Vietnam wall replica in Pasco

The replica of the Vietnam War Veterans Memorial wall displayed in Pasco holds memories that Pasco City councilman Al Yenney usually keeps hidden.

As a young platoon sergeant he had “seven days left in country before I was to come back to the world,” Yenney, a Vietnam War veteran, said at a Memorial Day ceremony held Monday in front of the wall at City View Cemetery in Pasco.

“I got in from an ambush patrol early in the morning and my replacement had arrived in the field,” he said.

“Hours later,” Yenney said. He paused and then finished with “his name is now on this wall.”

A couple hundred people came to the Memorial Day ceremony in Pasco, held in front of the traveling replica of the wall. Spelled out among the names of those killed or missing are 1,047 men and women from Washington state, 29 from the Tri-Cities.

Speakers stood before the wall and urged those at the ceremony to remember the men and women who had been lost in service to the nation, not just on Memorial Day but throughout the year.

“When you say thanks to one of your servicemen — to one of us who made it home — in your mind, just remember to say thank you to the heroes who didn’t make it home,” Yenney said.

Pledge to help widows and widowers, parents and children of the fallen, said Lt. Col Damon Delarosa, commander of the Walla Walla District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

“Thank you to all of you who have died to give us the freedom to worship how we want, to say what we want,” said Sal Beltran, of the Tri-Cities, a Vietnam veteran. “You gave us this freedom. We will never, ever forget.”

On the wall are the names of three young men who graduated with Beltran’s wife from a New Mexico high school and never made it to the age of 20. It also spells out the names of Beltran’s best friend and his cousin, who lost his life on the third day of his third tour of duty, Beltran said.

Many of those who attended the ceremony would look for a name on the wall after the speeches concluded. They made pencil rubbings of the engraved names and laid tributes, like a child’s crayon drawing, at the base of panels.

Those Americans who died in other wars, from the 620,000 Americans who died in the Civil War to the almost 8,000 who died in Iraq and Afghanistan, also were remembered on Monday.

Delarosa, a West Point graduate who has served nearly 20 years in the Army at postings around the world, described Memorial Day three years ago when he had just arrived at a new assignment with NATO’s Joint Forces Command in Brunssum, Netherlands.

His family went to the Netherlands American Cemetery in Margraten, expecting that with only a few hundred Americans in the area “it would be a nice, quaint ceremony to celebrate the day,” he said.

They had not counted on how appreciative the Dutch were of the Allies, especially the Americans who liberated them from the Germans in World War II. Each of the 8,301 graves in the cemetery is cared for by a Dutch family, with “their soldier” passed down from generation to generation, he said.

A couple of thousand people were at the cemetery, most of them Dutch and Belgian.

“For me, that experience justified my service to this nation,” Delarosa said. “It soothed the struggles I’d had with the loss of so many friends and teammates throughout this war, and it solidified my faith in the United States of America and what this country means to the rest of the world.”

The Pasco ceremony, one of several held in the Tri-Cities on Monday, concluded with a 21-gun salute, the playing of Taps and then the release of balloons.

Three-hundred red, white and blue balloons floated into the sky over the memorial wall in tribute to fallen veterans.

The wall will remain at the City View Cemetery through part of Tuesday. A brief ceremony will be held at 10 a.m. and a crew will arrive by 3 p.m. to pack up the wall.

This story was originally published May 29, 2017 at 2:12 PM with the headline "Fallen veterans remembered at Vietnam wall replica in Pasco."