Memorial honoring three Vietnam War vets to be unveiled in Bobtown Saturday
Courtesy of John Michniak
A memorial commemorating Bobtown soldiers lost in the Vietnam War will be unveiled in the Greene County community Sunday.
Joseph Paul Antonelli
Daniel Allum
Keith Held
Daniel Allum, Joseph Paul Antonelli and Keith Held were each barely out of high school when they were shipped to Vietnam to fight in the war that laid waste to that country and tore the United States apart.
None of the three Bobtown residents made it back alive. Each of the young men were just 20 when they died more than 8,000 miles from home.
The bodies of all three were brought back and rest in nearby cemeteries, but no memorial to the three was ever erected in Bobtown. That will be changing on Sunday at 1 p.m., when a granite stone marking the lives and service of Allum, Antonelli and Held will be unveiled at the Bobtown Honor Roll, located outside the Greene County community’s fire station at Larimer Avenue.
The effort to permanently memorialize the three fallen Vietnam veterans in their hometown was spearheaded by John Michniak, himself a resident of Bobtown and a retired corrections officer at the state prison in Greene County. Michniak was struck by the fact that the names of Allum, Antonelli and Held had been engraved on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., “but there was nothing locally.”
“People are forgetting,” Michniak said. “It needs to be done so our veterans won’t be forgotten.”
Given the controversy that swirled around the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, Michniak theorizes that Americans were eager to put the conflict out of mind, and so the process of creating memorials has been prolonged.
“It was a time when the soldiers didn’t get the welcome they deserved,” he explained. “I felt that it needed to be done.”
Allum was born Sept. 2, 1945 – the day World War II came to an end, with Japan’s formal surrender to the Allies – and was killed in action in the Long An province in what was then South Vietnam on Oct. 27, 1965. Antonelli was born May 11, 1949, and died in Chau Doc province in South Vietnam on Jan. 14, 1970. Held was born Jan. 28, 1950, and died in the Phuoc Long province of South Vietnam on June 1, 1970.
The memorial was financed through community donations. The response was so overwhelming, that Michniak was easily able to surpass the $2,500 goal.
He pointed out, “I had to turn a lot of people away; I didn’t want any excess.”