Father’s Day Roses at Vietnam Wall
(Photo credit Sherry Long)
Daddy, Father, Pop, Ol’ Man or Dad
No matter what your dad answers to Father’s Day is a magical time for children and their dads.
After all Father’s Day is a special day to spend honoring the men who changed our diapers, taught us to ride bikes, who we have loved, looked up to and even served as our personal ATM machines growing up.
2015 Father’s Day was especially powerful for me. It stretched all
weekend as I spent it with hundreds of other Vietnam Veteran children saying wishing their daddies a “Happy Father’s Day” by visiting them at the shiny black marble stretching at the edge of the National Mall.
I was lucky. I got my daddy for 37 years. He was there for my first birthday, my first day of school, my 8th grade prom, my high school and college graduations. Many of the other sons and daughters attending the Father’s Day ceremony at the Vietnam Wall were not so lucky, their father’s died in Vietnam serving our country when the children were still in diapers.
Every year the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund hosts an colossal patriotic ceremony honoring millions of heroic servicemen and women who served America overseas during the Vietnam Wall.
It was a beautiful and heart-tugging ceremony held just steps away from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. Veterans’ sons and daughters, myself and my brother included, proudly carry thousands of donated roses to The Wall bearing the name of more than 58,307 people who died or went missing during the war.
Fathers everywhere deserve to be remembered even if they no longer walk among us.
HAPPY FATHER’S DAY DADDY
My daddy during his first and only visit
to the Vietnam Wall in July 2007.
(Photo credit by Sherry Long)
Sherry Long 