The 25th anniversary of the Vietnam vigil will be held this weekend.
LISBON – Once a year, they stand poised beside a U.S. flag for hours, one hour for each Maine soldier still deemed missing in action from the Vietnam War.
However, there are fewer standing vigil than there used to be.
“We’re getting old,” said Holly Dube, who has twice done the 14-hour remembrance, in which pairs of people take turns in 10-minute shifts. Most of the members are in their 50s and 60s. “You get really tired. The next day, you can’t do much else.”
Yet, the lost soldiers need to be remembered, Dube said.
“People need to care that we have men who are still unaccounted for,” she said. “You have to keep the issue alive.”
The group has been meeting for its annual vigils since 1978, three years after the last GIs came home from the Vietnam War. For a while, there was plenty of help.
Sometimes there were dozens of people, Dube said. Local supermarkets would bring food and coffee to the vigileers.
“You can’t know how good a cup of coffee tastes when you’ve been up all night,” Dube said. These days, the group is lucky to get 10 or 15 people to help.
“Nobody knows what we’re doing,” she said. “It’s discouraging.”
So the Maine Vietnam Veterans Vigil Committee will hold a 25th anniversary celebration on Oct. 18. The goal is to reunite with people who have been part of past vigils and draw in new people who are willing to help, said Bill Thomas, the committee’s chairman.
Members are hosting a supper and a dance. U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine, is expected to attend. There will be raffles. Leaders hope to raise enough money to buy a cover for their float, a traveling platform for their group which includes an empty chair for each of Maine’s MIAs.
Eventually, the group and its counterparts in other states hope to add pressure on U.S. government officials. Their aim is to raise efforts to recover the bodies of U.S. soldiers lost in the war.
“We assume they are dead,” Dube said. “But we need to bring their bodies home.”
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