Vets-event organizer drops plans for parade
Military museum to show film instead
DannaKay Duggar remembers watching the evening news with her father, a longstanding nightly ritual, when American troops returned home from the Vietnam War in the early 1970s.
Duggar, then 9 years old, saw broadcasts of angry war protesters meeting soldiers at the airport — an image she said never left her.
About 40 years later, Duggar, the director of the Jacksonville Military Museum, heard of a town throwing a belated “welcome home” parade for veterans who served in the Vietnam War, and she decided to host an event of her own.
“I though, ‘ Oh my gosh, we have to do that,’” Duggar said. “It just broke my heart to see how they were treated. I didn’t know if the war was right or wrong — I was only a kid — but I did know they shouldn’t have treated soldiers that way.”
On April 11, Duggar will host the fourth annual Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day at the museum, 100 Veterans Circle in Jacksonville.
But the event will be without one of its staples: a parade.
In 2012, the first year the event was held, hundreds of people attended the afternoon parade. It was led by an honor guard from Little Rock Air Force Base and included members of the Distinguished Flying Cross Society, Combat Veteran Motorcycle Association, Beebe
High School Air Force junior ROTC, Arkansas Military Vehicle Preservation Society and American Legion posts, as well as a pipes and drums band, the Jacksonville High School drum line and staff from the USS Razorback.
Since then, both the number of onlookers and parade participants have dwindled, even as other welcome home events throughout the day have thrived, Duggar said.
“There won’t be the pomp and circumstance,” said Lana Roach, the daughter of a Vietnam veteran who has attended the festivities each year. “It [the parade] got smaller and smaller and smaller the past few years, which is really sad.”
Duggar put out the call earlier this year for more organizations to participate, thinking she’d give a parade one last try.
She decided to drop the parade from the schedule after receiving approval from the Arkansas Educational Television Network to show Last Days in Vietnam, an Academy Award-nominated documentary that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year.
“We always kind of struggled with the parade,” Duggar said. “I don’t know if part of it is that parades are out of fashion, but the weather never cooperated with us, either.
“When this opportunity to show the film came along, I said, ‘You know what, we’ll do this,’” Duggar said. “It just worked out good.”
Duggar said she’s optimistic that the event — the largest of the museum’s gatherings — will continue to grow, even without the parade in the schedule.
Welcome Home Vietnam Veterans Day will include a remembrance ceremony, dinner, live music and free admission to the museum, which will house a special Vietnam War display.
There will be free showings of Last Days in Vietnam at 10:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. The movie is part of PBS’ American Experience documentary series and centers on the fall of Saigon in April 1975.
In the past, attendees have included state lawmakers, Vietnam veterans and their families, and current service members, Duggar said.
“Two years ago there was a Vietnam veteran who was a Marine, and he was completely surrounded by 12 young Marines,” Duggar said. “He was telling his war stories, and they were just glued. I thought, ‘Wow. This is why we do what we do.’”
Roach hopes the community will continue to support the event, which she said is “near and dear to my heart.”
“These veterans never really got the recognition they deserved,” Roach said. “We need everyone to come together to celebrate.”