As reported in this week’s issue of The Garden City News, Mayor Robert J. Rothschild announced at Tuesday’s Board of Trustees meeting that a subcommittee has been formed to study a proposal by Garden City resident and Vietnam veteran Cyril Smith to improve the Village’s veterans’ memorial.

The News has already printed several letters written by veterans’ families to the Mayor and/or Board in support of the plan. Here are two more:

After reading the beautiful letters by the relatives of those young men who died fighting for this country in Vietnam, I decided it was time for me to write. I am the mother of one those fallen, Walter Chapman Jones 3rd. He was my first born.

While blessed with two other fine children and many grandchildren and great- grandchildren, I still mourn the loss of our Walter as only a mother can. I watched him grow as a young man in Brooklyn, both street smart and protective of his siblings.

When we moved to Garden City, Walter adapted well and continued his big brother support of his sister and brother. He was always a young man on the go; he commuted back to Brooklyn Prep every day by train to complete his work there. When he went off to college, I sensed that Villanova was not to his liking, but still I admit to disappointment when he dropped out - he was not yet ready for college.

I acknowledge too that I fretted as he worked various jobs and was more interested in the hot rods that he so loved. But I knew there was this energy in him and whether it was that drive, or just one too many scrapped knuckles working on those car engines, he enrolled at Hofstra.

Everything came together for him there, he was an excellent student and a leader of his fraternity. In our family, we paid for tuition but Walter and the other children would have to make their own spending money. He took a job at Mercy Hospital and then at Zoli’s, the Hofstra off-campus hotspot where he was the lead bartender.

Our family had always prided itself on service to America, so it was of little surprise that Walter, while at Hofstra, joined the Marines to become an officer upon graduation. He met the lovely Virginia at Hofstra and it was evident to me that the two were wonderful for each other.

Those were great days for proud parents when Walter received his lieutenant’s bars and then later his aviator wings. I could see the pride that his younger brother had in his older brother and suspected that Steve, too, would be in the military when old enough. I also saw how Virginia and his sister beamed with pride.

My cup runneth over when Walt and Virginia had a lovely daughter, Barbara. Walter had several different military postings rising to be Captain. Yet I knew that with Vietnam escalating as an ever bigger war, Walter would serve over there. As a Marine aviator trained in carrier operations and with his smarts and leadership, Walter would be an outstanding commander of men in wartime.

I know he filtered the letters he sent here because the papers were filled with the air attacks over North Vietnam and the terrible losses, but Walt’s letters revealed little of that.

As my other son prepared to enter the U.S. Navy as an officer on an attack transport, some of my focus was then on him. I knew that Walter had completed his 100-mission limit and would be offered a desk job. I had miscalculated.

I should have realized that Walt’s toughness and pride in the Marines would not have him taking a desk job. He had become a Forward Air Officer, a hazardous position serving one of the toughest Marine battalions in Vietnam’s most difficult combat area.

It wasn’t too long after that, and just as Steve had reported to his new ship, when the Marine officers were at my daughter-in-law’s door with the message no wife, no mother, no parent and no family ever wishes to receive. Walter had died in ground combat.

This April will be the forty-second anniversary of that terrible day.

I have been shown the wonderful things that past classmates, fraternity brothers and others have written on the computer about Walter. How they remember with great affection the tall, good-looking, young man who was a born leader. There is one from a woman who Walt saved from drowning at Jones Beach when both were students. I noted, too, that she had written on how life comes around for she now has a son who became a Marine.

As I watched all three of my children grow up in Garden City, I was glad we had moved here, for each became a special person. It is a community that helps makes that happen and it is now time for Garden City to also come around, to complete that circle, to honor those who answered America’s call.

Margaret Jones

Dear Sir or Madam:

This is written on behalf of my mother and myself in homage to her brother and my uncle, Rick Ohler, who I never had opportunity to meeting. In January 1969, Rick was severely wounded during the Tet Offensive and passed away several months later at Valley Forge Medical Center in Pennsylvania. Both he and my mother were born and raised in Garden City on Bayberry Road, and it is for that reason we ask that Garden City honor his name and sacrifice, along with the others who so valiantly served.

I never had the chance to know my uncle, being born after his death, but his name and service are honored within our family. I have visited the Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC to see that wonderful tribute and had also viewed the virtual wall for his name. I was gratified when I found the outpouring of reminisces on Rick by men he served with. Some of whom were in the battle that mortally wounded him.

It was on that virtual wall that I left my own commemoration. It must have been my uncle’s unseen hand that had me leave contact information. When Mr. Smith contacted me, I realized that the Garden City that he and my mother so dearly loved had not forgotten Rick Ohler.

My uncle was both a star student and a great athlete, the leader of the football team. A powerful young man, he was every coach’s dream of a lineman. His strength was legendary: at GCHS where he bent the football blocking sled, and in Vietnam where he carried a motor block across a compound.

But it was his intellect that had him placed into military intelligence. In a suburb of Saigon, where the Army should never have had a sensitive facility, he and others studied the Viet Cong. Perhaps he would have finished his tour as an analyst, except for that surprise of Tet, when the enemy simultaneously attacked almost every important base. The isolated ones, even though surrounded by the suburbs, were especially vulnerable.

His comrades have explained how many of them had not fired their weapons since basic training. When the commandoes blew the barbed wire apart and rushed in to massacre the post, and if it was not for one of them taking his rifle to the latrine that evening, all would have been lost. One young man delayed them long enough that Rick and the others fought the Viet Cong off.

But another outpost, the intriguingly named Plum Farm, had not been so fortunate. Much of the outpost was in enemy hands and the remaining troops close to being wiped out, pleading for help. It was Rick and four others who volunteered go off in the cold dawn under heavy fire to help Plum Farm.

The battle there, I am told, had combatants mere feet apart. It was touch and go when Army helicopter gunships arrived, one with the letters HELL painted on its belly. I gather the firepower of these gunships can demolish a suburban block within seconds. The enemy attack was broken; Plum Farm survived but in the rubble was my uncle with severe wounds to his legs.

My mother tells me of the family back home worrying first at the news of Tet and the attacks on Saigon, of the bittersweet notification of his being wounded “at least he was not dead.” But then the ever grimmer news of his evacuation to Japan and the loss of his leg, then further evacuation to Valley Forge and his other leg being amputated. His legs were once so powerful he could lift the front end of a car with them.

Death came quietly to him for above all he was a quiet man but he should not be a forgotten man. Once again Americans are at war and again we are quiet both in even knowing what occurs a half world away and quiet in how we choose to honor, or not, those that protect us. My uncle was the epitome of Garden City, a Village I know only from my mother’s fond memories of it, but our future memories should include the names of Rick Ohler and the other brave men of Garden City.

Lisa M. Ayasse Siniscalchi

And on Behalf of My Mother, Loretta H. Ohler Ayasse