Click image for slideshow




By Keith Gushard

Meadville Tribune

Memorial Day is a time of reflection — not only to honor those in the armed forces who have made the ultimate sacrifice, but also those who are serving now, said Robert Eiler, a past state commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

“Memorial Day is a day of conflicting emotions for each of us,” said Eiler at Meadville’s observance of the holiday. “A blend of pride and mournfulness, gratitude and loss and a deep abiding sense of patriotism.”



Click icon for video of Eiler's speach




You must have Quicktime installed to view this video




Eiler, of Conneaut Lake, served as state commander of the VFW in 2005-2006. He was guest speaker at the Meadville Area Memorial Day Committee’s program, entitled “They Served with Honor, Preserving Freedom.” A crowd of more than 500 was on hand for Monday’s midday ceremonies at Meadville’s Diamond Park.

The sacrifices that have been made are sometimes forgotten or disregarded — especially by those who have gained the most from them, according to Eiler.

“I think that it would be a good idea for those who take so much for granted to consider what alternatives would be available to them, if not for the selfless sacrifice of so many of our comrades,” he said.

The public must be on guard against those who may try to rewrite the history of freedom’s struggles, Eiler said.

“As we speak of the present and the distant past, it is up to us to make sure the legacy of our nation’s fallen is passed on from this generation to the next and then on to all generations beyond,” he said. “We must ensure that the youth of tomorrow have an awareness and understanding of whom it is they should likewise honor and exactly why they should honor them.”

The nation also has a responsibility and obligation to treat its veterans with respect and dignity and make sure they receive proper care and compensation for their injuries and illnesses connected to their military service, he said.

“The defenders of this nation fulfilled their duty and obligation to us, and we have an equal duty to honor and fulfill our obligations to them,” he said. “To do anything less is to betray the memory and the sacrifice of our dead.”

The nation’s destiny as a free people is entirely up to the people, according to Eiler.

“Let every deed and act of each of our days, be guided by the memory of those who gave their lives for our future freedoms,” Eiler said. “And may their sacrifice continue to inspire use and fill us with hope all the days of our lives.”

Monday’s ceremonies were preceded by a parade in Meadville from Terrace Street to Water Street to Chestnut Street to the Diamond.

Traditional ceremonial activities including readings of the “Gettysburg Address” and “Flanders Field”; salutes to fallen soldiers and sailors as well as playing of “Taps” and a rifle salute.



Keith Gushard can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at kgushard@meadvilletribune.com.



Related Memorial Day story that appeared in Monday's Tribune

By Ed Mailliard

meadville tribune

As a high school social studies teacher, Bob Matthews was surprised that so little textbook space was devoted to the Vietnam War. And as a veteran of that war, he decided to do something about it.

“The lessons students were learning about Vietnam were about a page and a half in their history books, and that just wasn’t good enough,” said the former Meadville Area Senior High School teacher. So, in the early 1990s, a decade after moving from Meadville to North Carolina, Matthews began shaping a new curriculum, Lessons of Vietnam, so high school students could study more than the few paragraphs and dates “his war” had become.

Today, his expanded course has gone national — it’s offered in more than 600 schools in some 30 states — and international: It’s also being taught in Vietnam.

There was a key element to the way Matthews taught the course (and it took some coaxing on his part!) but, before long, Vietnam veterans were accepting the invitation to visit his classrooms to talk to the students. Couple that with Matthews’ passion to teach and with the small textbook he authored, and Lessons of Vietnam began to grow impressively. In the past 15 years, it’s been reported on extensively by the Raleigh-area media, and it was the topic of a USA Today feature story in the mid-1990s.

The day Matthews assigned himself to this mission is still fresh in his mind. It came during a visit to The Wall, the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., that lists the names of the more than 58,000 American military personnel who sacrificed their lives in Vietnam. “Seeing all those names, including guys I had served with, I made a promise to the people on the wall, the one’s who didn’t come back. The wall was meant to heal the nation, which it has. But I felt a kind of a debt. I feel very lucky, privileged really, to tell their stories.”

One of the first school district to use Lessons of Vietnam was Crawford Central, a school system still close to Matthews’ heart. A Pittsburgh native, Matthews enrolled as an education major at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1960s — until the military draft put his education on hold during his senior year.

After two years in the service, including 13 months in Vietnam, first as a foot soldier in the hills and then with some “safer” duties, he came home.

“Out of the Army, I came to Meadville and I had a love affair with the town and the schools from Day One,” he recalls. Meadville Junior High principal (and later district superintendent) Jim LaScola took the young teacher under his wing. Before long, Matthews was a teacher in the district and took over the varsity baseball team’s head coaching duties from LaScola. Matthews led the Bulldogs from 1968 to 1980, including 10 straight winning seasons and 10 straight Section 2 championships. It was a great ride, and he still stays in close contact with some of his former Dogs.

In 1981, he moved on to North Carolina. Success continued, both in the classroom and on the sports fields. Seven times he earned Teacher of the Year honors, and he coached his teams to several league championships in both baseball and soccer.

Matthews retired recently after 40 years as a teacher and coach. The career hit its end point, though, three years ago when a serious health problem that slowed him down — a brain aneurysm. “I never left my feet,” he recalls, but the ruptured blood vessel had taken its toll. “I tried to come back, but the old spark really wasn’t there.”

He now substitute teaches on occasion and also spends many hours promoting his Lessons of Vietnam curriculum. This includes work with North Carolina Vietnam Veterans Inc., as well as a group he has helped form, the Bridge Back Foundation that collects donations to fund therapeutic and educational trips for veterans back to Vietnam.

In October, Matthews will help lead a second trip back to Vietnam. “This course has made teachers around here much more worldly and much more aware,” he said. “It’s also helped them to understand what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan much better.”

And the plans keep coming. “We’ve established 100 pen pals with Americans and Vietnamese, and on Oct. 13, about 20 of us will be going to Vietnam for 10 days — all the people who helped me for the past 10 years.

“This course has been legendary,” Matthews says both humbly and proudly. Then he adds with a laugh, “Around here, they call me the Vietnam guy.”



Ed Mailliard can be reached at 724-6370 or by e-mail at ed@meadvilletribune.com.







Matthews’ Lessons

still taught in Meadville



When Bob Matthews offered his Lessons of Vietnam course work to Crawford Central School District about 15 years ago, he saw the gesture as a gift to the school system that gave him his first break. “The faculty, the administrators, everyone there was just great,” Matthews recalls, “and especially the students.”

As a coach and a teacher he developed strong relationships with the kids. In 1998, when Meadville was visited by The Moving Wall (a scaled-down replica of the permanent monument in Washington, D.C.), Matthews made a visit back to Meadville. “He made arrangements to get the entire high school student body to visit Diamond Park and see the wall,” recalls Lary Williams, longtime Meadville teacher and administrator, now retired. “He was very enthusiastic, and he bused practically the whole school to the Diamond.”

After more than a decade, Matthews’ Lessons of Vietnam curriculum is still used in the high school as a teaching aid about the Vietnam War, school district officials confirmed.

The text and video materials are strong teaching tools, they said, but one part of the course is less than Matthews would hope for — “visits from the soldiers haven’t really been a strong part of the course here,” said Jennifer Galdon, director of secondary curriculum.





Did you know



The Vietnam War occurred in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia from 1959 to April 1975 — fought between the communist North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of South Vietnam, supported by the United States and other member nations of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

The Vietcong, the lightly armed South Vietnamese communist insurgency, largely fought a guerrilla war against anti-communist forces in the region. The North Vietnamese Army engaged in a more conventional war, at times committing large-sized units into battle. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search-and-destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery and air strikes.

The United States entered the war to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment. Military advisors arrived beginning in 1950. U.S. involvement escalated in the early 1960s and combat units were deployed beginning in 1965. Involvement peaked in 1968 at the time of the Tet Offensive. Despite a peace treaty signed by all parties in January 1973, fighting continued. In April 1975, North Vietnam captured Saigon. North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year.

The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities, including 3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers.

—Wikipedia