RUN FOR THE WALL RIDERS PASS THROUGH N.M.
Hundreds of riders pass through Santa Fe on way to Vietnam memorial in D.C.
They drove 200 miles from Gallup to Santa Fe before noon. The morning had been unseasonably cold, with scattered snowflakes blowing across the desert landscape.
When the fleet of more than 300 motorcyclists disembarked in front of the Harley-Davidson store at the edge of the Santa Fe Place mall, their cheeks were red from the cold and wind, and many walked with a slow, tilted step. Their breath was labored.
This is the 29th year that thousands of motorcyclists, mostly military veterans and their supporters, have taken the 10-day Run for the Wall ride across the country, a journey that ends on Memorial Day in the name of a soldier lost — killed, missing in action or taken prisoner — during war.
The trip spans more than 2,600 miles from Ontario, Calif., to Washington, D.C. On Friday, the third day of the event, riders were expected to cross 284 miles of New Mexico highways. New Mexico was the first state to offer the riders a border-to-border state police escort.
Many of the riders had served in the Vietnam War and were riding toward the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, a gleaming, granite wall, 2 acres long and 10 feet tall, that leads up to the Washington Monument. It lists more than 58,000 U.S. servicemen and women who fought, died or went missing in action during the war. New names are added each year.
“The first time you come, it is overwhelming,” said Monica Fredericks, 63, of California, who started riding motorcycles five years ago and was on her third Run for the Wall ride. “New Mexico is probably the most patriotic state I have ever been in. There are so many people that come out. It’s just really emotional for most of us.”
“We are from the Vietnam era,” she added.
When Fredericks was 16, she said, she took part in Vietnam War protests. She saw good friends leave for the war and not return.
More than 9 million troops served in the military in the two decades of war that ended in 1975, though fewer than 3 million are estimated to have been deployed to Vietnam. More than 1 million Vietnam civilians were killed over that period.
Between 2001 and 2015, in contrast, 2.7 million servicemen and women were deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, and 6,800 members of the military and 7,000 U.S. contractors have been killed since the wars began. More than 210,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University.
Run for the Wall organizers said a handful of veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had joined the ride from Gallup this year, and roughly 40 percent of the riders were first-timers.
Scott Cramlet, 17, Fredericks’ nephew from Palm Desert, Calif., was one of the people participating in the ride for the first time, riding on the back of his father’s bike.
“He told me it was something I would never forget,” the high school junior said. “It’s really incredible. The best part was riding through Albuquerque — the freeway — we had the highway all to ourself.”
Around the room at the Santa Fe Harley-Davidson store, motorists in heavy leather and denim jackets — each a unique collage of cloth patches — had placed American and New Mexico flags in their helmets. They stood in line to get gear, and several were having their bikes fixed in a shop in the back.
Buffalo Wild Wings donated food for the event, and the riders said gas stations and casinos along the route agreed to fuel them up for free.
Leslie Tuttle said she rode from Kansas City, Mo., to California for the start of the official ride with the American Legion Post 21 veterans association. Her road name is “Lady Bug” because, she said, “I cling to the vets.”
“I’m an FNG and proud of it,” she said, meaning a first-time rider or “fun new guy,” although the “F” stands for a different word, depending on whom you ask.
Tuttle is also part of the Vietnam Veterans 50th Commemoration, a program started by the Department of Defense in 2012 to pay tribute to Vietnam Veterans.
Tuttle called over “Wolf Man” to show off the small, bronze pin fastened to his leather jacket, honoring the New Mexico veteran for his service.
Wolf Man — aka Larry Hurtado, 71, of Peña Blanca — had a grizzled white beard, mustache and hair that fell below his shoulders. The back of his jacket depicted soldiers and helicopters flying over a blazing red and yellow horizon. It read, “Vets don’t forget.” A small patch below it said, “Navajo Veteran.”
He was deployed to Vietnam when he was just 20, he said. He remembered his sister dropping him off at an airport in California in 1967, and waiting for his flight across the Pacific Ocean for a full day. Planes were grounded by fog.
At the airport, a cheerleader for the Kansas City Chiefs, who had just lost the Super Bowl, hugged him and asked him not to go — “from her heart,” he said.
Six months later, he was struck in the head and flown out of Vietnam, ultimately discharged with a disability. He said the war took all of him — first his head injury and now lasting heart damage and colon cancer from exposure to the chemical herbicide Agent Orange, which was sprayed through the forests of Vietnam to defoliate the trees as a war tactic.
“What else is left?” he asked, his arm still wrapped around Lady Bug, who he’d met only that morning.
Roland Vigil, 69, of Nambe Pueblo said it is important to create awareness of veterans through the ride. “Very few of the guys who started it are still doing it,” he said.
The back of his jacket had 15 patches, including a bald eagle, a “Native pride” badge, a smiling scull representing the “Agent Orange health club” and one that read, “Jane Fonda Communist at Heart Traitor by Choice.”
The patches show where you’ve been, who you are, said Vigil’s wife, Dianne.
“It’s a beautiful country. The people are nice,” Vigil said of Vietnam. “They happened to be on one side of the war, and we were on the other.”
Most of the veterans said they didn’t know why so many men who served in the military — Army pilots and Marines alike — are drawn to life on the road, holding tight to the vibrating handles of a hog as they ride down miles of wide-open highway. Maybe the camaraderie or the freedom, they said.
Jerry Hensley, 56, a volunteer whose jacket identified him as “Shark,” said, “You’re on the open road and you are free from everything else.”
Ron Barela, 69, said that when he’s on the road now, he gets the smell of something familiar — a whiff of the lush rice paddies that flank the Vietnam countryside — and remembers.
“Some gave some,” he said of the war. “Some gave all.”
As quickly as the group had descended on the motorcycle store, they departed to their collection of gleaming, humming vehicles. But they stayed idle a while longer, waiting on a single bike that was still in the garage.
They never leave a bike behind.
Run for the Wall organizers said a handful of veterans from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had joined the ride from Gallup.