The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Portland honors veterans with dinner
PORTLAND — The high school cafeteria was filled with more than 200 veterans and their significant others.
It was the annual Veteran’s Day dinner, put on by Seb Melilli, the owner of Melilli Café and Grill.
The tone of the evening was set by state Rep. Christie Carpino, who was helping out.
“Thank you for putting your lives on the line. We will never forget you. Tonight, we will serve you,” Carpino said.
The mood in the cafeteria was relaxed, the room alive with the buzz of multiple conversations.
Baseball caps from different branches of the armed forces were a common sight.
Men who fought in Korea exchanged war stories with veterans of Vietnam.
Here and there, scattered among the diners, were younger men who had served in Afghanistan and/ or Iraq.
Interservice rivalries were put aside for the night.
This was a family dinner, with airman and Marines, soldiers and sailors all mixed together, brothers all (with the occasional sister) sitting side by side.
In the hierarchy of veterans, those who fought in World War II stand at the pinnacle.
These were the men — some 16 million strong — who fought in essence two wars, one in the Atlantic, the other in the Pacific, and won them both.
They did so in 1,347 days, from the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the cessation of hostilities in the Pacific on August 15, 1945.
Now, however, the survivors of that massive force are all too quickly passing away.
Their number has fallen to below 500,000, according to most estimates. The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates more than 600 World War II veterans die each day.
The National World War II Museum in New Orleans puts the number of surviving World War II veterans in Connecticut at 5,861.
Several of those survivors were at the dinner Monday.
One of them was Louis Hayden, a 94yearold Navy veteran who served on an attack transport in the Pacific for three years.
Hayden had never been to one of the dinners, despite repeated requests from his daughter Debbie Sullivan.
“I’d tell him, ‘This is for you guys – for the veterans,’” she said. But still he would say no.
But then something remarkable happened to Hayden last month.
In the company of 22 other veterans, including two women, Hayden and Sullivan flew to Washington on an Honor Flight, which take veterans to the Capital to see the World War II Memorial.
When Hayden and Sullivan arrived back at Bradley Airport, he was not prepared for the greeting he received.
As they entered the terminal, they passed between two rows of people lined up and applauding the veterans and thanking them for their service.
“I never imagined I would get a response like that,” he said.
It brought tears to his eyes, he said.
“It was the best day of my life,” he told his daughter. “The whole thing was firstclass.”
This time when Sullivan asked him to join her for the dinner, Hayden said yes.
“I’m very glad he came. This is really a nice thing, and they deserve the honor and respect,” Sullivan said.
Hayden and his three brothers all served in the war.
“Can you imagine my mother and what she had to go through?” he said.
Fortunately, all four of the brothers returned safely.
Hayden joined the navy in 1943, leaving high school without getting his diploma.
Sullivan has a photo of him taken just after he enlisted that she keeps on her cell phone. In it, Hayden looks ready for anything that may come his way.
Told he looked full of pep and vinegar, Hayden laughingly agreed. “Yeah. Didn’t I?”
He served in the southwest Pacific, in and among the Solomon Islands as the Americans leapfrogged their way north and west to the eventual return to the Philippines in 1944.
After he got out of the service, Hayden went to college under the GI Bill, and then went to work for Hartz Mountain Corp., the birdseed and pet food company.
Since retiring from Hartz, Hayden has volunteered with the VA in Newington
His brothers, two of whom served in the Army and one who served in the Army Air Forces, “they never discussed the war.”
But Hayden worked to encourage veterans to speak openly about their fears and anxieties.
To this day, he can remember watching soldiers and Marines clamoring over the side of his ship and climbing down nets to be loaded into Higgins boats for the runin to yet another hellish beach.
“All those young guys,” he said. “You could see their faces…”
Reach Jeff Mill at jmill@middletownpress.com