Gratitude and pride
Tuolumne pays tribute to those who served
Army veteran Aaron Rasmussen, who served in Iraq, and advocates for other military veterans and his community through Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4748 in Tuolumne, led a prayer at the start of a Veterans Day gathering and ceremony Friday morning at the 9/11 Memorial next to Tuolumne Veterans Hall.
“Thank you for this day, thank you for our veterans, thank you for the community that we serve,” Rasmussen said. “May this ceremony bless everyone that’s here, and those that have departed.”
Chris Henningsen, who served in the U.S. Marines from 2000 to 2007, including deployment to Iraq, defined Veterans Day for the audience of about 100 people who came to say thanks.
Veterans Day came from observances of Armistice Day at the end of World War I in Europe, where hostilities ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in the year 1918. Armistice Day evolved to Veterans Day to celebrate veterans of all wars, living and deceased, in 1954.
“Today, this very hour, marks the 104th anniversary of the end of World War I,” Henningsen said.
Henningson listed out the military’s six service branches: Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Space Force, and Coast Guard. He invited veterans in the audience to stand and introduce themselves.
Frank Smart, who served in the 1st Cavalry, U.S. Army, in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, introduced Susan Escallier, a retired, Airborne-qualified brigadier general in the U.S. Army, who served 32 years on active duty. Smart has helped coordinate the funding and building of several veterans memorials, and he has recently helped with the Tuolumne County Women Veterans Memorial in Twain Harte.
“I was in the process of putting together a group of women veterans to help me with that,” Smart said. “It’s their memorial and I want them to have a say-so… I invited Susan to come join our group, and she has become basically the keynote speaker for us, going out into the com
munity, and talking to the Kiwanis clubs and Rotaries and different women’s organizations and telling them about this memorial we’re going to build on Fuller Drive in Twain Harte.”
Escallier is proud of her service, Smart said. Coming into the military on an ROTC commission and rising to the rank of brigadier general is no small achievement, and she shattered a few glass ceilings on her way up, Smart said.
In addition to her deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Liberia, Escallier jumped out of perfectly good airplanes with the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne, “and the ladies on this committee we have call her a badass,” Smart said.
Escallier spoke about how in recent years, she and other military veterans have served at a time when the military is respected and appreciated by the American public, but that has not always been the case. She asked the audience to join her in a round of applause for all generations of military veterans, to thank them for their service.
Many veterans attending the Tuolumne gathering served during the Vietnam War, when some soldiers, sailors, and airmen returned from Vietnam to be vilified at home by people opposed to U.S. prosecution of the controversial war.
“The time that I served in the military, it was always a volunteer force,” Escallier said. “I will tell you that we continue to get outstanding Americans who want to serve their country, who want to enlist, who want to become officers. I thinkin this audience you probably encourage people you know to consider service to the country, and I would ask you this Veterans Day to think about having a conversation with a young person about the benefits of military service.”
Near the end of the gathering, Barbara Persson, 87, of Tuolumne, came to the microphone and expressed gratitude and pride in her four brothers who all served in the military during the Vietnam War.
Persson attended Summerville High School in the early 1950s, and she is one of the oldest members of the Tuolumne Band of Me-wuk Indians. She said her brothers Jesse James, Leonard James and Harold James served in the Navy, and her brother Don A. James served in the Army.
Persson said she also has a son, Fred E. Persson III, a grandson, A.J. Persson, and a great-grandson, Joshua Dunlap, who have all served or are serving in the Navy. She wore a Tshirt displaying the names of more than 45 family and friends who are military veterans.
“I had to say something, honey,” Persson said, “because they’ve done so much and I’m so proud of them.”