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WWII veterans return home from 'Honor Flight'

This story borrowed and re-published in full  from the KTVU Channel 2 News Website

Thanks to you, our donors, we were able to provide mobility to these veterans that served in WWII during their trip to Washington D.C on an “Honor Flight”.

SAN FRANCISCO — Bay Area World War II veterans who took an “honor flight” to see the war memorial in Washington, D.C. arrived back home Sunday. Families held flags and signs at San Francisco International Airport for an emotional reunion with their veterans.

“My dad is legally blind, legally deaf, he’s an amputee, he’s had two heart surgeries and he’s got lung cancer – so he’s living on borrowed time,” said Janice Lopez. The Fremont Firefighters Union had raised $30,000 to send the 30 veterans to see the war memorial before it’s too late. Some of the firefighters went on the trip to chaperon the veterans.

WWII veterans return home from Honor Flight. Photo courtesy of KTVU Channel 2 News

WWII veterans return home from Honor Flight. Photo courtesy of KTVU Channel 2 News

World War II veteran Art Perry told KTVU the trip meant he was able to talk with people his age, who went through the same thing he did. “It made me feel really good having someone like that to talk to,” he said.

For some, the trip meant closure. Sgt. Art Perry was 22 years old when he served as an Army Sergeant in World War II. He hadn’t really talked about the war until now. “I think this is a long time coming,” said Perry’s daughter Dianne Madronio.

For others at the airport, the veterans return was a life lesson as they expressed their love and appreciation. “This is the greatest generation there was. They honored us; they wouldn’t let us honor them,” said Ray Wilkenson with the Fremont Fire Department.

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Mobility For Amercia

Dear Friends,

As two of our nation’s greatest holidays approach, Memorial Day and Independence Day, we are reminded of those who have sacrificed for our freedom and independence. Yet many of our fellow Americans continue to live their lives without the simplest of freedoms and a basic human right: Mobility!

soldier_vetWhile you celebrate with your families, remember those Americans who lack basic mobility such as a veteran who has defended our nation or a child who can’t attend school. Honor freedom by providing wheelchairs for recipients in the USA through our “Mobility for America” program where we dedicate your donations to anyone in the USA who needs our help. To date we have given out over 35,000 wheelchairs to fellow Americans and so many thousands more are still desperately in need.

We receive phone calls weekly from individuals here in the United States who are either denied access to or do not have the ability to acquire a wheelchair. One such call was received from a gentleman named Jaime. The insurance company had denied Jaime a wheelchair which he could not afford to purchase on his own. After months of frustrating attempts to find a new or used wheelchair, his daughter heard about the Wheelchair Foundation. Jamie suffers from diabetic neuropathic arthropathy, also known as Charcot, and his severely deformed feet are unable to hold his weight. Soon after her call, father and daughter were in our office parking lot joyfully testing out a new wheelchair. Jaime is delighted to “now be able to do some things on his own,” and is thankful for the Wheelchair Foundation and the donors who made this gift possible.

With your gift of $100 or more, we will send you a red triple function pen with flashlight and stylus to remind you throughout the year of your generous donation.

Donate $150 or more and you will also receive a personalized certificate with a photo of a wheelchair recipient, sent in a beautiful presentation folder.

As an additional token of our appreciation, with your donation of $500 or more, we will include our deluxe,
multipurpose duffle bag.

Simply call us directly at 877-378-3839, or  donate on line through our website (www.wheelchairfoundation.org).

The Wheelchair Foundation, the world’s largest wheelchair relief organization, has distributed over 960,000 wheelchairs in 150+ countries. We are completely donor-driven and this amazing accomplishment is a direct result of overwhelming generosity on the part of our donors. Thank you for your continuing dedication and for your support of those in need of wheelchairs in the USA!

Sincerely,

David Behring
President

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A Courageous Veteran Receives Mobility

We received this letter from Emile Meylan, the father of Mariela Meylan, a US Veteran that was injured while serving over seas.

Mariela on graduation day from the US Army.

Mariela on graduation day from the US Army.

My daughter, Mariela, served in the U.S. Military.  She was stationed in Kuwait and was injured in an auto accident while on patrol.  On December 19th, 2004, she and three other soldiers were changing a flat tire on their truck on the side of the road, when their vehicle was hit by a passing motorist.  

The hit-and-run driver fled the scene.  Two of the soldiers that were with her were killed.  My daughter was so severely injured in the accident that she was transferred from Kuwait, to Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany.    My wife, our Son-in-Law and I all traveled to Germany to be with her.  When we arrived on Christmas Day, Mariela was in a coma.

Due to the severity of her injuries, on December 26th she was transferred to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.  We were invited to fly home with her aboard an Air Evac C141 Flying Hospital plane, along with fifty other soldiers injured in Iraq.  Some were missing limbs, others, like Mariela, were non-responsive.

Mariela in her new sports wheelchair.

Mariela in her new sports wheelchair.

Mariela spent nearly eight months in a coma.  She stayed two years at Walter Reed Medical Center, and was then transferred to the Veteran’s Hospital in Livermore, California, where she would spend another year.  After a year in Livermore’s facility she was allowed tom come home with us. 

Here prognosis was that she would never wake up from her coma, but she did!  It was also thought that she would never regain her ability to walk, but she did!

All of this, we have, thanks to people like Mark Williams, and Matt Beinke and the Wheelchair Foundation. 

Thank you,

Emile Meylan

Thank you Emile for sending us this letter and the pictures of Mariela and THANK YOU Mariela for your service to our country.

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Wheelchair to Water – Wheelchair Foundation assists a veteran with a little "Surf Action".

A couple of months ago, we received an email from Mr. Bradley Cook, who’s involved with “Surf Action,” an organization dedicated to helping military veterans and their families affected by PTSD and physical injuries.  Below is his letter.

“Hello, my name is Bradley Cook. I live in Bude, Cornwall. I am involved with a group called Surf Action, which is a charity dedicated to helping military veterans and their families affected by PTSD and physical injuries. The charity itself is fairly big, and the sessions me and a cluster of friends do is kind of a separate branch dedicated to one or two local guys. We are part of Surf Action, but it’s different. It’s hard to explain by email. We try and do a session a week ( Surf, Weather, Tide), depending. I had never done anything like this before. It sounds cheesy, but the experience has changed my life. Seeing the happiness that it brings to the guys we do it with is a feeling I just have no words for. What we do is so effective for the veterans, as we are not therapists, we are just a bunch of surfers and watermen.steve_volunteers We don’t judge or treat them like they are ill. All we do is give them the opportunity to experience the love and passion we have for the water.

The main guy we do it for is Steve Binns. He is paralyzed from the chest down. We have a customized surf board to suit his needs. What this man has achieved in a fairly short time scale is incredible. The local local life guards help out so much, driving him down to the beach if they are on duty. All of us have full time jobs, so generally the can only time we can do the sessions is after 6 when the life guards finish. The local council was letting us use one of their all terrain wheelchairs to take Steve to the waters edge. Out of the blue, they decided to stop allowing this when the lifeguards are off duty. One or two of us are trained life guards, and the rest are either surf instructors or have 5 + years surfing, so are more than competent in the water.

What we are doing at the moment is laying him on the board and carrying him down to the water. We have only noticed it now, as the beaches are getting very busy, as it’s holiday season. It is not a hardship for us, as we would carry him to to all corners of the earth if we had to. It comes across as Steve doesn’t care, but he is an old army veteran. As you can imagine, he’s very stubborn and will always put on a strong front. But he has given so much for this country and been paralyzed for a long time. He already has people staring all the time, and when you walk across the beach in the summer carrying a man on a surfboard, there are a lot of people staring. Steve doesn’t deserve this. The process that we are taking to get access to the chair we more than likely will, but it will be a very long time until we do. So I am trying other ways. I am not emailing you as a member of surf action. They don’t know that I’m seeking charity. I am emailing you as Bradley Cook. If there is any chance you could donate an all terrain chair, that would be fantastic.

Regards,

Bradley.”

After reading this email and speaking with Bradley, we were able to find a wheelchair that would suit Steve’s needs.  Just today we received this letter and update from Gary Howes, a member of the Bude Surf Action Volunteer group.

“Dear Wheelchair Foundation,

I do hope you are well. I am Garry Howes, a proud member of the Bude Surf Action Volunteer group. I would like to thank  you on behalf of our group for the generous donation of a wheelchair from your fantastic organisation to Steve, our inspirational friend. We are proud of Brad’s initiative in contacting you. I am delighted to tell you that the wheelchair has duly arrived, and has been used most successfully in transporting Steve to the seashore in order that he can surf accordingly.

I respectfully propose we stay in touch – and we will continue to inform you of our group’s activities. I can assure you that the donation of your wheelchair is a significant building block in developing our group. I am in the process of distributing the story of how we came to receive the wheelchair, accompanied with the photos we are sending you.

Yours sincerely

Garry Howes

Bude

Cornwall

England”

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Vets on Mission of Peace to Vietnam

Jerry Yahiro wants to return to the Vietnamese highlands where he led a mortar platoon almost 40 years ago.

Rich Vannucci wants to see former battlefields in the country he briefly set foot on as a sailor almost five decades ago.

A former sailor, John Reese, was spurred to return by a mission of peace and good will, instead of war and destruction.

On Friday, these and six other veterans, all Bay Area residents, will travel back to Vietnam, to a country they last saw in war. Their journey will take them not only across an ocean but back in time to a place that, for better or worse, most of them never forgot.

“I’m sure that everybody’s a little bit spooked by the thing and antsy about it, but they’re all anxious to face their demons, so to speak,” said real estate broker and trip organizer Mike Weber of Viet Nam Veterans of Diablo Valley. “There’s great motivation to go do this.”

That’s largely because the trip is more than an opportunity to revisit Vietnam and make peace with the past. During their 13-day trip, the veterans will help hand out 560 wheelchairs, bought in large part with money the veterans raised, to disabled Vietnamese.

During the past two years, the group raised $22,000 to buy wheelchairs. The Danville-based nonprofit Wheelchair Foundation, founded by Blackhawk resident and Seattle Seahawks owner Ken Behring, matched that amount and organized the purchase and distribution of the wheelchairs.

The veterans also raised about $3,500 to distribute to Vietnamese youth shelters and orphanages. Veterans also plan to bring toiletries and school supplies for the shelters and orphanages.

For at least some of the nine veterans who are returning to Vietnam for the first time, the chance to contribute to the well-being of the Vietnamese people overcame their wariness.

“I think this trip, being that we’re going back doing something good, overwhelms all the bad memories I have,” said Yahiro, 62, a Pacific Bell retiree and former Army captain.

Last week, as the group’s departure date approached, the Danville resident still worried that the trip would resurrect traumatic memories of combat. Yet he was willing to take that chance.

“I want to see the country,” said Yahiro, who hopes to visit Montagnards, an ethnic minority in Vietnam’s highlands and wartime ally of the United States. “I want to meet the people (and) see if there are any demons I have left that need to be put to bed.”

For Vannucci, who spent about seven weeks in Vietnam in 1959 while serving aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, the trip is a chance to learn more about a war that claimed the lives of some 58,000 U.S. military personnel and wounded about 300,000.

The retired Navy master chief was in Vietnam when the first U.S. troops were killed in action. When he returns, the military history buff wants to learn more about how North Vietnam defeated its enemies, including the French forces that fought there before the United States.

“I want to see how Gen. Giap was able to bring down the French and essentially bring down the United States,” the 69-year-old Castro Valley resident said, referring to North Vietnam’s commander in chief.

Not everyone in the veterans group wanted to go back to Vietnam. Some feared that the trip would let loose haunting memories that they have managed to bar behind closed doors.

Even among those who decided to brave the trip, some were concerned about the reception they would receive, said Weber, who first returned to Vietnam in 2003 on a wheelchair mission and is returning again Friday.

Weber reassured the group that Vietnamese, even those directly affected by the war, treat returning veterans without animosity and usually greet them warmly. On Weber’s first trip, for instance, a Vietnamese woman dining with him mentioned that American forces killed her father.

“We had kind of an awkward moment, and I didn’t give her any kind of response to that; I just hushed,” said the 58-year-old Blackhawk resident and former Army medic. “Pretty soon, she said: ‘Well, that was then and this is now, and let’s enjoy the lunch.’”

If there was anxiety amid the group of veterans, who will be joined on the trip by five traveling companions and two charity representatives, it didn’t show when they met last week at Weber’s home to plan for the journey.

The mood was jovial as the group nibbled appetizers, sipped drinks and sorted out logistics details such as the group’s six-city itinerary, what clothing to pack and how their charitable mission would unfold.

Among them was Reese, a former Navy lieutenant junior grade who spent three tours in the war in 1970-74, including serving as a diver who cleared mines.

The 58-year-old Walnut Creek resident, whose ailments include post-traumatic stress disorder, was concerned that the trip could aggravate his physical and psychological conditions. But he and his doctors agreed that the peaceful journey would be healing.

“I’m just pleased to go back for a different reason,” Reese said. “To go back and do something valuable in a country that we fought in is extremely special.”

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Dogen Hannah covers the military and the home front. Reach him at 925-945-4794 or

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