veteran’s corner

A day to recognize sacrifice

Jason Hicks

With Memorial Day fast approaching so is summertime.

As the unofficial start of summer, I would like to remind people of the reason. It is a day to recognize sacrifice on behalf of our great republic.

There is a lot of preparation the goes into each and every Memorial Day. Have you ever wondered who places all the little flags on the grave sites? That huge task involves hundreds of volunteers and thousands of flags. There are veterans groups, boy scouts and a very large contingent from US Bank that place the small flags on each and every marked veteran’s grave. Do you notice I say marked? For many years I have heard people ask why so-and-so didn’t get a flag on their grave as they were a veteran. If a gravestone is not marked we simply have no way of knowing short of personal knowledge. Sadly, many of our older members who have this knowledge have passed on as well.

Our area groups place these flags the Thursday before Memorial Day (May 26th) and collect them the Tuesday (May 31st) after. If you have a loved one who served but the grave isn’t marked, please try to stop by and speak to one of our volunteers and we will provide a flag for you to place. All of the flags we place are a standard size and make. Our Veterans groups are consistently working on swapping out worn, torn and destroyed flags. Another thing that occurs is that sometimes a family places their own flag and it is accidently picked up and mixed in with ours. We try our best to avoid this from happening.

As many of you know and some may not, we have a new veteran’s organization that conducts the military funerals at the Fargo National Cemetery. The Fargo memorial honor guard was formed specifically for this purpose as we recognized that no stand-alone veteran’s organization will be able to handle this activity. So we recruited and fund-raised and now it is a smooth flowing operation. As many of you have probably seen or heard, we are currently looking to build a structure to support ceremonies at the National cemetery. The VA has a wonderful set up and we simply want to provide a welcome and comforting environment for the families of our departed comrades. Stay tuned for further developments as we have gained a lot of momentum with this project and have raised several hundred thousand dollars ( Not a penny of tax payer money as of this date). We have tremendous community and grass roots support. In later columns I will outline just a few of the things encountered when working on such a commonsense project.

As a quick reminder there will be a short program at Bonanzaville. The veteran celebration runs from 6:00pm to 7:30 PM with BBQ, entertainment and door prizes. Contact Bonazaville for further details.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.