'We were persistent': Long effort brings The Wall That Heals to Caldwell for four days
CALDWELL − The Wall That Heals is a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and has traveled across the country. This October, it will be found at 215 West St. in Caldwell.
The three-quarter scale replica will be open to the public 24 hours a day starting on Thursday, Oct. 19, until the following Sunday after the closing ceremony at 2 p.m. The names of six service members from Noble County can be found on the wall with 3,000 listed from the state of Ohio.
There will be group tours, a memorial ceremony at 10 a.m. Oct. 21, and the Mobile Education Center that comes with four additional displays. One of those displays will include Hometown Heroes, where photos can be found of the local service members whose names are on the wall.
“I will be in attendance every day during the event,” Village Administrator and site coordinator for the event Darrell Crum said. “Scheduled ceremonies include daily respect to the American flag and taps, on Saturday at 10 a.m. we will feature Major General Edward J. Mechenbier, a United States Air Force Pilot who was shot down and spent nearly six years as a prisoner of war.”
One hundred and fifty of the 188 volunteer slots have been filled for the event that will be trained to assist visitors with finding names, answering questions, and directing parking.
“Having served in the United States Air Force for 22 years, I am extremely proud and honored to give tribute to my mentors when I enlisted in the early 1980s,” Crum said. “It will be a very emotional and moving event.”
The event is co-hosted by Noble County Veterans Services, thanks to the efforts of Veteran Service Officer and Marine veteran Joe Williams.
“We applied in the previous consecutive years and were denied, but we were persistent that we wanted to host. We have worked towards this for three years,” Williams said.
This year will be season 28 of touring for the wall with Caldwell being stop 28 out of 32. In 2021 the wall had been viewed by nearly 200,000 visitors throughout the 26 communities it had visited.
“I hope today’s youth will take the opportunity to engage in this era of war history. When your small town is chosen to be one of only 32 destinations privileged to host the memorial, it means you deserve the opportunity to showcase your community and pay tribute to an era when the servicemen and women weren’t appreciated,” Crum said.
A few years ago, Williams was visited by the parents of a fellow Marine that was deployed with Williams in Iraq and died. They told him something that summarizes how important events like this are and why.
“They told me how devastating it was to lose him, but then they said something that really weighed on me, ‘As a parent of someone who serves overseas, your greatest fear is that they will be killed. As the parent of someone who was killed overseas, your greatest fear is they will be forgotten,’” Williams recalled.
More information on The Wall That Heals can be found on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s website.
This article originally appeared on The Daily Jeffersonian: Replica of Vietnam Veterans Memorial coming to Caldwell in October
