Sponge Homer

Homer H. Hillis, Jr. sponges all kinds of information, business, political and trends. I've been seen on the Sally Jesse Rafeal show with noted trend spotter Faith Popcorn. My Blog will give you an over view of what I'm seeing and reflections on the same.

Saturday, September 13, 2003

In Abilene we are in the 2nd day of the Vietnam Wall experience. I began working with a grassroots committee to bring the Wall here, we are one of 2 places the traveling wall will be in Texas. Over 30 people have worked tirelessly to get this event to Abilene and make it a success and looking at the crowd today I would say its a huge success. The wall is a 1/5th size replica of the one in DC and has all Vietnam War casualties on it over 58,000 names etched in the granite wall, today people lined up to scratch a relief of their loved on on a small piece of paper.
As a young boy the Vietnam war was so foreign to me. I used to watch my grandfather (Benjamin Winslow Hillis) watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Seeing the war report was puzzling. Until one day my dad & I caught a huge Yellow Catfish and I had my picture in the local paper holding this big fish. I was 8 yrs old. A Uvalde Leader News made it to Vietnam and a soldier read about me and wrote me a letter saying that he loved the photo of the fish and when he returned on leave he wanted to meet me. To an 8 year old a visit from a US soldier was just about as big as it gets. And one day this fully decorated US soldier came by to meet me, I was on cloud nine. He wanted to hear a fish story and I wanted to hear war stories.
Vietnam was a wound and is a wound but thanks to events like this the wounds are healing.
I'm grateful for those men who when called served!

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