CHURCH POINT, La. — Memorial Day.
A time to remember our country's heroes — many who never made it back home.
At Depot Park in Church Point, veterans belonging to the local VFW and American Legion participated once again in their annual weekend-long tribute to their fallen brothers and sisters in service, specifically the Church Point 21, a group of men who served and never returned to their hometown. Every Memorial Day weekend, hour on the hour, from sunrise to sunset, veterans participate in patrols, finishing the holiday weekend with a closing ceremony honoring veterans past and present with a 21-gun salute.
Those who served told KATC Memorial Day is more than a day off from work, but a solemn reminder of those who don't have that privilege. For many, this pang of wartime pain still lingers and hits close to home.
Dennis Hart is the commander of American Legion Post 225. A lifelong serviceman with a decades-long career, he is reminded of his older brother Mike on Memorial Day. Hart is a third-generation sailor, but said while not much could separate him and his big brother, two things did: four years of life and the fact that Mike started his military career in the Marines.
"We spent many a Thanksgiving joking about that very thing," Hart told KATC. "Our experiences were very different, most of my time was on the ship, he was in a foxhole in the jungle."
For Mike Hart, his experience in the jungle lasted long after he made it out, like many other brave Marines.
"During the Vietnam War, we were trying to fight in a jungle situation, so in order to see what was there, they sprayed defoliant over the entire country and of course the G.I.s were underneath the trees and they were sprayed with the defoliant," Dennis Hart said. "And at the same time, it was on the ground and in the air and it caused a multitude of cancers."
That defoliant — known as Agent Orange — is what ended up taking Mike's life, as he died from complications from Agent Orange poisoning in 2002.
Sadly, Hart told KATC loss is something many brothers in service share.
Donnie Fontenot, Commander of VFW Post 8971 in Eunice served on the U.S.S. Russell with a man named Michael Noeth.
"A quiet little guy, he liked to draw, wore those little round glasses to the point his nose looked like Popeye," Fontenot said. "And everybody would leave the ship to go out and party and he would pull out his pastels and his paper and would paint the sunsets in Pearl Harbor with Arizona in the background."
For Noeth, however, things changed in 2001.
"He was at the Pentagon painting admirals' portraits and stuff like that during the 9/11 attack," Fontenot told KATC. "For me, we all have someone we can connect to... I know a guy who didn't make it home."
It's another example of exactly why these veterans say they will be honoring their deceased brothers and sisters in service with these patrols, not just on Memorial Day, but the whole weekend long, every year.
Looking ahead, the veterans told KATC they simply want to encourage the public, wherever they are, to remember the fallen any time they see the American Flag.
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