SWANTON, Vt. (WCAX) – The Fourth of July is about celebrating the birth of the nation, but that freedom has never been free. So, on Independence Day, Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 778 in Swanton raised the Purple Heart flag to honor and remember residents wounded in war or who never came home.
“It means a lot of things, but I think mostly it means I got to come home,” said Frank Bilodeau, who was wounded in Iraq and said he was honored to see the flag raised.
Other veterans recounted harrowing moments when they were wounded in Vietnam. “I got hit with the first bullet. The guy next to me got shot in the neck. The guy on my right got shot through the shoulder,” recalled David Hemingway.
“I was blown up by a mine that threw me through the air. Blew my rifle and blew most of my clothes off me and I spent two and a half months in the hospital,” said Elbert Allen Towsley, who says he ended up receiving three Purple Hearts. “A lot of trauma going on and some people can handle it and some people can’t and I just can’t handle some of it.”
Towsley says beyond his physical wounds, he spent six stints in the psych ward for PTSD. He agrees that the flag-raising means a lot. “The more you keep it aware, people are aware of what is going on and the sacrifice that has been made in this country. It just, it’s meaningful,” he said.
Hemingway says he has spent decades commemorating Purple Heart recipients after his experiences as a 19-year-old in Vietnam. “In 1969, superior 400 Vietcong ambushed us in the jungle and I got shot multiple times in that firefight,” he said. After it was all over he says 23 of 43 of his fellow soldiers were wounded and eight died. “There’s nothing friendly about war. You lose friends you lose lives, you lose your youth. For the people that made it out alive, bless them because it haunts us today… They gave me a purple heart for my body wounds, but they didn’t give me nothing for my mind wounds.”
The VFW’s Charles Magnant says the Fourth of July is the perfect day to honor these men. “They fought for the right to do their freedoms, to do what they want to do. And Independence Day is the day we took over our freedoms, so it’s the perfect day to do it,” he said.
Above all, the veterans are proud they could serve their country. “I was proud to do it. It made me a proud American,” Hemingway said.