Liberty Fest: Traveling Vietnam Memorial Draws Thousands

Volunteers disassembled the Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall from its installation at Heritage Park Sunday after a brief closing service. Vietnam veterans John Spencer of Canton, Dennis Bielskis and Al Dorey co-chaired a committee to bring the memorial to Canton for the Vietnam Veterans of American Plymouth-Canton Chapter 528.

Spencer and Bielskis, talking as they helped with Sunday evening's work, each said they were pleased with the response to the memorial.

The traveling memorial is a 3/5-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, which carries the 58,267 names of the men and women in the U.S. military who served in Vietnam and were killed or remain missing in action.

Spencer said the support from the community included a donation of wood for the supporting platform by , which has made similar donations in other towns hosting the memoiral. Labor during set up was donated by members of the Detroit Carpentry Joint Aprenticeship.

During Thursday's opening ceremonies, Vietnam veteran and former U.S. Army sergeant Cliff Tholen of Ada read a poem, titled Names, which he wrote a few years after his first visit to the memorial wall in Washington.

Tholen was introduced by Spencer; the men are cousins. Spencer said Tholen volunteered for the Army and served in Vietnam from 1968 until he was wounded twice March 8, 1969. Tholen's military awards include the Bronze Star, for valor, and a Purple Heart.

Tholen said he first visited the Wall years ago on a break from a class in Washington. He went looking for the names of two men who had been killed on the day he was injured. Then he started wondering what happened to the others in his unit, recalling one name after another — and realized that the only way he would know is to see whether those names were on the wall. Fortunately, none were.

Hear Tholen read Names in this video.

It's not the first time VVA Chapter 528 members have hosted such a memorial -- Bielskis said it was the largest one. Chapter 528 members kept vigil during the memorial's stay in Canton, and at noon on Saturday, many helped read aloud the names on the panels with Michigan connections.

People who visited the memorial while it was in Canton expressed both reverence and some say such memorials serve a larger role.

"Everybody should see it. Just see it," said Michael Davis of Canton, who attended Thursday's opening ceremony with his wife Cheryl. "I think people are forgetting. They take their freedoms for granted. Those people on the Wall? They don't have it anymore."

Sunday evening, Judy Thomason cast a glance over to the VVA Chapter 528 volunteers,  including her husband Jerry, packing the last of the memorial into the truck and murmured, "They are so close. Like brothers."

Dennis Bielskis' wife, Patty gently cajoled the group into posing near the truck used to transport the memorial, to snap a few photos for VVA Chapter 528's archives. "They are just such a good bunch of guys," she said, smiling.

The next event hosted by VVA Chapter 528 will be what Bielskis dubbed a "man to man sale."

"You know how that have mom-to-mom sales?" he said. "This is like that, for men. We want them to clean out their 'junk' — car parts, tools, cars, sporting goods, golf clubs -- and sell it to each other."

Proceeds support Chapter 528 projects.