Vietnam War images on display at County Courthouse
Oct. 23—The Vietnam War was over a generation ago but it was a long time before many of its soldiers were able to come out and say they had fought in the conflict. Today, they are there at the airports when veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq come home from their global journey, supporting them the way they feel they should've been supported.
"A lot of them still haven't gotten over that," Gordy Bellinger of Niagara County Chapter 268, said. "My daughter was 19 years old before she ever even knew I served in the military. I just wouldn't talk about it. I just held it inside because I came home to a bad situation."
All these years later, it was Bellinger who spoke to Joe Jastrzemski, a civilian and Niagara County Clerk, about displaying a banner at the Purple Heart Ceremony along the Erie Canal. However, because of weather and the size of the banner, there were fears it'd blow away or torn. That was when Walter Moxham came into the picture and the three came up with a different solution.
"We started brainstorming — myself, and Gordy and Walter Moxham — to reach out to the county Legislature to see if we could display it in the rotunda along with their photos here in the month of October, leading up to and in honor of Veterans Day," Jastrzemski said.
The photos, called "Our Photo Album" were first displayed in 1990 at the Kenan Center and depicts images taken by the Niagara County native soldiers during their off-duty time in Vietnam. In 1990 there were almost 125 photographs in the possession of Walter Moxham, an Army veteran and now a local attorney, which travelled to Albany, as well as the Port Authority, several schools and sport shows.
Over the years the number of photos has increased to 500.
"We began to reach out to other Niagara County Vietnam veterans, who may not be a part of our group, but we wanted to include," Moxham said. "Other veterans came by. They heard about it, and they would come in by themselves and it was very cathartic."
"I think our photography show allowed more and more area veterans tell their story about where they were and what they did, and if they had photographs, they could share them with others."
Moxham said he was drafted into the Army as he was about to go to law school.
"I think when we got over there, by that point it was '69. Most of the guys I served with didn't know why we were there," he said. "They didn't want to be there. It was very confusing to them. They had families they wanted to be back with."
Moxham said that, "on top of this," the culture was so divisive back home, that when their tour was done, the soldiers, "just sort of slipped back in."
"My dad picked me up at the airport, we went and picked up my sister," he said. "Went home. Nobody asked me anything. Nobody said anything. You just were back to work on road construction. No one ever said anything. No one ever said, other than parents and close family, 'Welcome home,' or 'Thank you for your service.' "
That was something that Jastrzemski said hit hard at the time and still does.
"As county clerk, I'm honored the Veterans Affairs falls to me, because I grew up as a teenager in Elmira and I was in the last stretch and my number was high and the war was just ending," he said. "But I had so much respect for the veterans that went over and went off to Vietnam because it was such a trying time for them as Wally and Gordy have said. ... It's just like Wally said, you just want to 'slip back in' and you started to grow your hair so nobody knew that you were in the service, that you were over to Vietnam."
Today, the war is over, but the soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice are gone forever. Along with the photos on display at the County Courthouse on 175 Hawley St., also standing are the names of each soldier who was killed in Vietnam who never came home to Niagara County.
A small ceremony was held at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday which can be seen on LCTV Streaming at https://trms.lctv.net/CablecastPublicSite/show/7371?channel=3.
