Community Corner

Avon Veteran Sees Attitudes Come 'Full Circle' on Vietnam

The Gildo T. Consolini Post 3272 is educating residents about the controversial war, dispelling myths and honoring veterans through programming this year.

For the first time, the Avon Veterans of Foreign Wars post hosted an event recently at the Farmington Woods clubhouse honoring its Vietnam veterans and is planning more events related to the war this year.

About 60 veterans and their families attended.

"It's the 50th anniversary and we want to get the word out more and more," William Newman, a past Avon VFW commander of Gildo T. Consolini Post 3272, said. "We have people that have done everything in the war."

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About 617 Vietnam veterans with local connections are honored on a wall monument in the Avon Town Green. At least 115 have been associated with Avon's VFW, which has members predominantly from Avon, Canton and West Hartford.

Newman said that the Vietnam War is one of the most popular subjects of the nation's wars in part due to the controversy surrounding it.

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"I think it's because in some ways it was our second Civil War," said Newman, who is a Vietnam veteran himself. "It tore families apart. When Vietnam veterans came back, they were disparaged big time."

Newman, who is a Utica, NY, native, experienced this himself. When he got off the plane in Tacoma, WA, after a year in Vietnam, a young man accosted him and called him a "baby killer."

"You didn't normally tell anyone you were a Vietnam veteran because people looked at you like there was something wrong with you," Newman said, though he said he could talk to his family about the war. "Because I was more senior and older I had a better perspective on what was going on."

It took 15 years after the troops came home for many to talk about the war, he said.

"In the early days, young people not only despised Vietnam veterans, but they didn't want anything to do with them," Newman said.

While the Avon VFW post accepted Vietnam veterans, many VFWs denied them from their organizations. Some veterans, even in Avon, don't want anything to do with VFWs or the American Legion out of resentment for those rejections in other places, according to Newman.

"There's a lot of ill will," Newman said.

However, that attitude toward Vietnam veterans has come "full circle." Newman first noticed a change in the attitude toward Vietnam veterans when a wall memorializing fallen soldiers was completed in Washington D.C. in 1982. More recently, he said, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have re-established respect for Vietnam veterans.

Newman went through the ROTC program at John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH, and joined the U.S. Army as a commissioned second lieutenant after college in 1962. He became a captain for a combat support unit in the Central Isles of Vietnam and was there from September 1966-67.

He helped resupply units traveling 110 miles each way on a highway, facing "ambushes and snipers" along the way. It was a "very dangerous route," he said.

"My job was to protect the convoys and be the convoy commander," Newman said.

Avon has many other Vietnam veterans with interesting stories and Newman is sharing them. For instance, there's a plaque in Avon Town Hall honoring Craig Nobert, an Air Force veteran, who was never found after his plane was shot down during the Vietnam War in 1966.

Newman said it's important to educate people about the Vietnam War and dispel the myths about it. He said that the Avon VFW is working with the Historical Society to put a display about the Vietnam War in the History Room at the Avon Free Public Library next fall.

"We tell the story that we know," he said.


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