Remembering our Veterans Remembering our Veterans (November 04, 2005)

Downtown festivities mark Veterans Day this Sunday
Jeb Bing

Pleasanton will mark Veterans Day a few days early this year with its 9th Annual parade on Main Street starting at 1 p.m. Sunday, with a special ceremony that follows in Veterans Plaza Park on Peters Avenue.

More than 100 units are expected to participate in the parade, including floats, color guards and veterans honoring those who served and those who gave their lives in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo, Operation Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Pleasanton Community Concert Band under the direction of Bob Williams will provide music for the event, with Army Colonel Walter Haag traveling here from Washington, D.C. to deliver the keynote address. Haag is Director for Reserve Affairs in the Office of the Surgeon General.

Commander Dave Ham of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 6298 in Pleasanton said this year's observance will be held Sunday in advance of the officially declared Veterans Day holiday next Friday, Nov. 11, because that's when most people will be available to participate. Although schools and local, state, county and federal government offices will be closed next Friday, many businesses and most retail stores will remain open. Downtown retailers do not want Main Street closed on what traditionally is a busy shopping day just in advance of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season.

With the post office also closed next Friday, the Nov. 11 edition of the Pleasanton Weekly will be delivered on Saturday, Nov. 12.

This year, the VFW and American Legion are honoring military corpsmen, medics, nurses and doctors who have served from World War II through the Iraq Afghanistan conflicts. With the theme of "One-Winged Angels," parade participants will include Girl Scouts dressed as one-winged angels riding on a float that they have built to resemble a war zone operating room.

As part of its ongoing public service, the VFW, in concert with the city of Pleasanton, has adopted the 56 medics that are part of the 101st Airborne to receive letters and packages from home. Ham said the effort is part of a recognition of the service medical service units have performed through the years.
World War II

Fewer than 7,000 of those living in Pleasanton today were alive when the allies landed on Normandy on June 6, 1944, and just a fraction actually fought in World War II. But Danny Soria, a World War II veteran and past commander of the local VFW who will be in Sunday's parade, remembers it well. In fact, he was part of a lesser-known D-Day in the Pacific the same day. As American soldiers stormed across the beaches into France 61 years ago, Soria and his top-secret amphibious radar unit were landing on Manus in the Admiralty Islands in the country's battle against the Japanese. Word of the landings at Normandy was broadcast to Seaman First Class Soria's unit, but there was little time to celebrate. His team was moving inland to set up four separate radar operations, each with a 100-foot-high scanning tower, to help secure the islands for the Third and Seventh fleets. Although the First Cavalry had routed the enemy off Manus and nearby islands, Japanese soldiers were still being flushed out of tunnels and caves, most of them determined to take their own lives in final assaults on the invading Americans.

Soria, now 78, joined the Navy at age 16 after his father, at his son's persuasion, signed papers stating he was a year older and could serve. Danny Soria was the fourth son to go to war. Harold, then 24, was an Army sergeant major at Fort Ord; Ernest, 22, was an Army Communications Corps corporal marching with his unit across North Africa; Tony, at age 20, was in the Navy, serving in the South Pacific. A younger brother, Frank, who died in 1996, started serving in 1950 in the Army in Korea. Harold, the oldest brother, died in 1966.
KOREA
(PHOTO OF GENE COTA IN PHOTOS 04 & IN B&W ON TOP OF HALF-TRACK TRUCK)

Ask Gene Cota of the Pleasanton VFW how cold it was when he fought on the front lines in South Korea in the winter of 1951-52, and you get several four-letter expletives. "It would make Chicago's worst winter seem warm," he recalled.

Cota, 73, who lives on Driftwood Way in Highland Oaks with his wife Barbara, joined the Army National Guard in San Diego in 1949 to earn some extra money before continuing his education. The Guard was activated a few months after the Korean War started in 1950 and Cota was sent to automatic weapons training in Barstow.

Attached to the 40th Infantry Division of the 150th Regimental Combat Team, Cota's unit was shipped to Yokohama for more training, and then to Inchon where, in less than 12 hours, he was on the front line above the 38th parallel fighting the Communist North Koreans. As draftees filled the ranks, the Guard was sent back home in late June 1952, and Corporal Cota was released. He then joined the Air Force, serving in both Beirut and then in Vietnam in 1968 before being discharged in 1971 after a total of 22 years in military service.

That's when Barbara and Gene Cota bought their new home in Highland Oaks, where they raised their daughter Stephanie and son Mark. Gene Cota went to work for AC Transit, retiring there as a superintendent after 27-1/2 years.
Vietnam
(COVER IS PHOTO OF MARK SWEENEY; CURRENT PHOTOOF SWEENEY IS IN PHOTOS04 AS "BINH SON BRIDGE NOW.")
(PHOTO OF DAVID HAM IS IN PHOTOS 04)

Fighting in Vietnam was a rude awakening into adult life for VFW Commander David Ham, who is manager of site services for the Palo Alto Research Center. Fresh out of high school in tiny Independence, Iowa, Ham joined the Marines in 1965. After boot camp, he was sent to Vietnam in the following year, just as the Pentagon was ramping up the war and in time for the Tet offensive. Ham, a lance corporal, was a truck driver, wheeling a 2-1/2 ton truck filled with ammunition over rough roads and constantly under fire. Mortars frequently rained down on the convoys, and on one trip, a land mine blew up a truck just three vehicles ahead of Ham's, killing its occupants.

"Any soldier who says he wasn't scared is a liar," Ham said. "You thought about getting hit all the time."

Ham, now 58, was discharged after four years of service and eventually moved to Fremont to be near his brother. He married his wife Carol, and they moved to Pleasanton. They have two children: Julie Castillo, a first grade teacher at Vintage Hills Elementary School, and son Alex, a sophomore at Amador Valley High School.
Kosovo
(PHOTO OF DWIGHT CULL IS B&W OF HIM DRIVING ARMY TRUCK)

In 1999, former Army Specialist Dwight Cull served in Kosovo, a breakaway province of Yugoslavia that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic had ruthlessly fought to keep. As part of the United Nations peacekeeping force that moved in to protect and restore Kosovo, Cull served with the 54th Engineering Battalion of the 101st Airborne, constructing and rebuilding facilities and roads.

"Few Americans know much about Kosovo and it's hardly a tourist destination," Cull said. "But our engineering group was able to travel to some very remote parts of the country that are really quite beautiful, places that most foreigners never see."

Cull, who lives on Vineyard Avenue with his wife Elizabeth, served with the 101st for four years, including two years in Germany, before being released to inactive reserves for another four years.

"I just completed that duty last year, but I'll have to admit that I was a little nervous about being called back in for duty in Iraq for much of that time," Cull said.
Operation Desert Shield (Gulf War I)
(PHOTO OF CAROL BOHN IS IN PHOTOS 04)

Career Navy nurse Carol Bohn, who is Senior Vice Commander for the Pleasanton VFW Post, was deployed from the Naval Hospital in Oakland in August 1991 as the training officer on board the USNS Mercy, the Navy's hospital ship that served in the Arabian Gulf in support of Operation Desert Shield. For the next six months, she supervised the training of a staff that numbered 1,200 in medical support on a ship with 1,000 trauma beds, making it the largest trauma center in the world. During its time in the Gulf, the ship handled 690 patients and almost 300 surgeries. As the war ended, Bohn departed with the USNS Mercy in April 1992 for its home base in Oakland, and later to San Diego where it is now based.

Bohn's military service started back in 1964 as a sophomore in Vanderbilt University's School of Nursing, when she became the first woman to be accepted in the Navy ROTC program. She was commissioned in December, 1965, and took her nursing board exams after graduating the following June, joining active duty as a Navy lieutenant in 1966 at the Naval Hospital in Jacksonville.

In 1968 she married Randy Bohn, also a naval nurse, but left the Navy in 1969 to raise their family. Their daughter Debra Betz, now 34, lives in Maryland; son Jeffrey, now 33 and also married, lives in Tracy and served five years in the Navy.

"In fact, at one time there were eight in my family who were on active duty, and my sister is a Navy captain stationed in Monterey," Bohn said. When the Navy changed its rules and allowed married women to serve on active duty, Bohn joined the Navy again in 1978, retiring in 1998 after a total of 25 years in service. Her husband Randy retired as a Navy commander in 1991.The couple lives on Curtis Circle near Sportspark in a home they bought in 1984.
Iraq

Many in Pleasanton have served in Iraq or are still on active duty there, and most have yellow ribbons hanging from lamp posts downtown identifying them and their units. Quite a few who have since returned will be part of Sunday's parade, including Pleasanton Military Families, a group headed by Marine Reserves Col. Chris Buescher, an American Airlines pilot who returned from Iraq in 2003, his wife Tracey, and Lt. Col., U.S. Army (Ret.) Chris Miller.

Another active VFW member who served in Iraq is Diane Buckhout, who was an Air Force medic near the Baghdad airport in 2003. Trained in disaster emergency medical service, she was part of the Expeditionary Medical System's EMD hospital in Baghdad, a unit that can put up a portable hospital facility in less than 10 hours and have it fully functional within 24 hours.

The hospital took in injured soldiers around the clock even as incoming fire was landing nearby, treating patients with wounds that were not life-threatening and preparing others for evacuation to hospitals in Germany and other locations.

"It was a very rewarding experience, giving me a sense of doing something much bigger than myself," Buckhout said. "It made all of us feel good to be a part of that mission to take care of our injured and give them the best of care."

Actually, Buckhout, 54, should get a medal for perseverance in serving in the armed forces. She wanted to enlist as a medic and go to Vietnam after graduating from high school, but standing only 4-feet, 10-inches tall, she was told by an Air Force recruiter that she was just too short. After college and as a Girl Scout leader, she took her troop to the Hayward National Guard base on a tour, where a tech sergeant recruited her into the California Air National Guard.

After 33 years in the Air Force, Buckhout took her discharge as a senior non-commissioned officer as a result of an effort by the Air Force to open more senior positions to younger non-coms. But she's not through. Just last month, she joined the Army to continue her service, with some new military educational and active duty objectives in mind.

That could leave her husband Ron, a former Lucent Technologies researcher who is now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, alone at home again with their two sons, Lee, 24, and Brian, 22, who attend college locally.

Diane Buckhout, who has long been active in the Pleasanton VFW, explained her passion for military service:

"My dad was in the Air Force for 20 years, my younger sister was on active duty and my older sister married an Army man," she said. "I guess it's in my blood."
Community supports soldiers in Iraq

Dave Ham, president of Veterans of Foreign Wars 6298, talks to people at the Pleasanton Farmers' Market about why they should consider adopting a member of Charlie Company, a medical troop stationed in Iraq that Pleasanton adopted in September. The VFW organized an adoption drive last Saturday in coordination with Buddy Poppy Day, an annual VFW fundraiser to provide assistance for local veterans.

Standing out in the market with a poster of the 56 soldiers to be adopted, Ham and others in the VFW inspired the public to get involved with all 56 members of Charlie Company adopted that day.

"We went from having seven soldiers adopted at the start to 56," Ham said. "Is that a good day or what?"

Now that all the medics have been adopted, the VFW is going to start a second round, and perhaps a third so each soldier in Charlie Company will have three people writing to them.

The VFW will have two adoption booths during the Veterans Day Parade Sunday for those who would like to sign up. Those who can't make it to the parade, but still want to get involved with the adoption can call Gloria Stahlnecker at 846-5453.

E-mail a friend a link to this story.