July 11, 2010

Heroes’ Welcome: Somber ceremony honors contributions of veterans

Military memorabilia, displays and ball round out day

By Kathy Ursprung
The Chronicle

     Slowly, they gathered together and shared their names — men and women, young and old, fleet and hobbled — conjuring images from history and headlines: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
     Spanning seven decades in age, each stood tall and saluted before Mike Serna to be called by the name that binds them all: Warriors.
     Friday night in The Dalles Civic Auditorium’s Fireside Room, about 30 people received the Warriors Medal of Valor in a special ceremony conducted by Mike Serna, a member of the Apache tribe.
     The ceremony was part of a day-long Heroes Welcome ceremony at the Civic that celebrated the contributions of veterans in all the U.S. wars. The event included military displays, food and reminiscing over memorabilia and old USO videos, as well as a veterans ball later in the evening.
     The medal, which depicts a bald eagle on an American flag background, has been approved unanimously by the 565 tribes of the Native American Nations of the United States of America.
     “To get 565 tribes to agree on one thing is a feat in itself,” said Serna during the otherwise somber ceremony of praise and prayer. Serna is the son of Marshall “Tall Eagle” Serna, who spearheaded the medal effort. The elder Serna was unable to attend the ceremony following a recent stroke.
     “In the Native American culture, it’s a great honor being a warrior,” Serna said. “We take great pride in being warriors.”
     Serna, a veteran himself, spoke of his father’s experiences in the Vietnam war and his own as a young son watching the television and hoping for a glimpse of his father. And he spoke of their shared experience with post traumatic stress disorder.
     “All the men I see here are warriors,” he said. “And all the women are warriors of sorts, too, keeping the home fires burning, doing without money to pay bills. They’re the ones who watch for us on the TV every night. They’re the ones who cry if someone from Afghanistan or Iraq dies, even if it isn’t someone they knew, because it could have been theirs.”
     Serna played “Taps” and “Amazing Grace” on a wooden flute, offered a pray for the wellbeing of the soldiers in the room, and read poetry written by veterans about their pride and struggles during wartime and afterward.
     A handful of uniformed guardsmen, bound this fall for overseas duty, hesitated to take the medals because they hadn’t yet served overseas. Serna and others in the audience urged them forward as the final warriors to receive the medals.
     “We owe you and we won’t forget you,” he said.

Allan Morrison: Soldier adrift finds safe harbor

By Ethan Knudson
The Chronicle

     Twenty years ago Allan Morrison, a Vietnam veteran, got a call from Mike Roth, then the veteran employment representative at the State Employment Office in The Dalles to come apply for a job, and it made all the difference.
     Today Morrison works in that same position, helping other veterans as Roth helped him. As a veteran, he understands how difficult readjustment can be, and will do whatever it takes to get them the help they need.
     “He’s a popular guy. He does a lot of good,” said Brian Johnson, a work study intern at the employment office who finished his service in Afghanistan two years ago.
After graduating from high school in The Dalles, Morrison went to Blue Mountain Community College and Eastern Oregon University for a year each on a baseball scholarship. Yet he was not passionate about school and dropped out after his second year.
     “I was spending money I didn’t have and working on stuff I didn’t care about,” Morrison said. “Why get so smart when I was just going to go over there and stop a bullet when I finished college anyways?”
     Soon enough, just as he expected, Morrison was drafted. He served his two years and returned to a country where he was unappreciated. Too messed up to go to school after returning, he floundered.
     “No one respected you, you were a bum,” he said. “My priorities were completely messed up.”
     As the veteran employment representative at the Employment Office, Morrison sees a lot of people in the same position. After the war, peoples’ dreams disappear. They just don’t seem to care anymore, he said.
     Though he’s an employment representative, Morrison deals with people who need all sorts of help. As veterans services are so dispersed, men and women in his office may need anything from training in new skills to psychological help.
     “You never tell them they came to the wrong door, because if you give them an incomplete answer you’ll lose them forever,” he said.
     Morrison has personally driven veterans to the correct office because of mental emergencies, he said.
     Recent veterans face difficult circumstances because of the economy, he said.
“Now they come back and don’t have a chance to make a living,” he said. “It just makes it worse.”
     Morrison eventually went back to school at Columbia Gorge Community College for his associate’s degree, where he discovered that he was actually a good student. He was married and had two sons, but went to Marylhurst University to finish his bachelor’s in psychology while working at an alcohol and drug treatment center nights.
     Roth called to encourage Morrison to apply for a job adjudicating unemployment insurance claims that had opened up at the State Employment Office in The Dalles.      He applied, got the job, and spent the next fourteen years working in the position. Roth eventually moved on to working with incarcerated veterans, and Morrison took over his position.
     Recently Morrison became part of the ad-hoc veterans committee that will oversee and help fill the veterans service officer position that has remained vacant for so long.
With this group he is also working to get a full-time physician in the VA clinic in town.      Though the building is complete, a doctor is only available there a few days each month, Morrison said.
     “If it weren’t for Mike Roth, I wouldn’t be here,” he said.

Steve Lawrence: From jungles to general's mess

By Theodoric Meyer
The Chronicle

     When Steve Lawrence joined the Army in the late 1960s, he thought he’d be serving as an intelligence officer, monitoring Russian transmissions with the Army Security Agency.
     After enlisting, though, Lawrence’s orders were changed and he was sent to Officer Candidate School, where he trained as a platoon leader. And in those days, Lawrence said, if you’d just finished OCS, “the only thing they wanted you to do was go to Vietnam.”
     Lawrence, a retired lawyer, is now president of the board of directors of The Dalles Civic Auditorium, which hosted an event to celebrate area veterans on Thursday as part of Fort Dalles Days. Veterans gathered at the Civic Auditorium to eat hamburgers, watch old USO footage and swap stories of their time in the service.
     Though he spent a good deal of his time running the event, Lawrence sat down for a few minutes to talk about his own experiences in Vietnam.
     Deployed in 1968, Lawrence served in Vietnam with the First Cavalry Division for a year, fighting in the mountains near the demilitarized zone between North and South Vietnam as well as the swampy jungle along the Cambodian border.
     On the trip over, he said, he befriended a soldier named PFC White, who had just gotten married and was worried about combat. Lawrence was separated from White upon arrival in Vietnam, but against the odds, they found themselves in the same company when Lawrence reached the DMZ. Seven days later, White was dead.
     “At that point, I had 355 days left, and I really didn’t want to be there anymore,” Lawrence said.
     After six months in the field, Lawrence was interviewed for and got a position as protocol officer to a high-ranking general.
     “I went from platoon leader one day, living in the jungle,” he said, “to protocol officer eating in the general’s mess with tablecloths and silverware.”
     Lawrence’s last day in the field, he said, was Dec. 23. The next night, Christmas Eve, he dined on steak and lobster and champagne with the officers. Still, he felt conflicted.
     “I sort of felt guilty being in that nice environment when other people I knew weren’t,” he said.
     Lawrence finished his tour as a protocol officer and then returned to Oregon, where he attended Portland State University and went on to a career as lawyer. Since retiring, he has written a fictionalized account of his time in Vietnam titled “First Light” – a reference, he said, to the most dangerous time of day during the war. He is set to meet with several agents at the Willamette Writers Conference next month.
     Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan today, Lawrence said, are in many ways better off than the soldiers who came back from Vietnam in the late ’60s and early ’70s.      Services for veterans are better, and the returning soldiers don’t face the widespread stigma that service in Vietnam carried. Still, Lawrence was unsure whether the country is prepared for the numbers of new veterans who will come home.
     “The veterans who are coming back now, they’ve been over two, three, sometimes four times,” he said. “They’re going to need a lot of support. We haven’t even seen the beginning of how much support they’re going to need.”