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Speakers honor fallen veterans at Memorial Day tribute in Petaluma

The Press Democrat - 5/31/2022

May 30—It was a rare Memorial Day on Monday. It came and went with no American troops engaged in active combat overseas, the first time that had happened in at least 20 years.

"And for that I'm grateful," Petaluma Mayor Teresa Barrett told a loosely arranged crowd of more than 200 people at Cypress Hill Memorial Park on Monday. "That does not mean, however, that we do not have servicemen and women who are in harm's way. We do. I just hope we can have a year where we're not adding to the numbers of those we are mourning and honoring today."

Graves of dozens of fallen soldiers and sailors were marked by small American flags at Cypress Hill. They received a 21-gun salute, a rendition of Taps bugled by Colin Bergstrom and words of praise from a succession of speakers that included Sonoma County Supervisor David Rabbitt and Andrew LeMarquand, commander of Petaluma's Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge.

"It felt like coming home," LeMarquand said afterward. "I've seen the other side of war, with people dying in combat. I've been a casualty officer, where I had to get stuff home to families. But I've never seen the other side. So it was great to see all the generations out here."

Even if no American troops are overtly fighting on foreign soil, the threat of war continues to hang in the air following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and its ongoing occupation of large portions of the Donbas region. There were many references to Vladimir Putin's aggression Monday, some of them blunter than others.

"I know what's going on in Ukraine," said Richard Bergeron, an officer with American Legion Post 28 in Petaluma, "because I faced the Russians."

Bergeron, trained as a U.S. Army machine-gunner, was sent to West Germany, as it was then known, in the early 1960s. His primary duty there was to drive infantrymen to the border with Czechoslovakia, where the two world powers of the Cold War were in the midst of a frosty, yearslong stare-down. He lost three fellow service members, Bergeron said; two committed suicide, while a third was shot dead at the border.

Bergeron recounted that experience a few years ago at an annual luncheon for veterans at Liberty Elementary School in Petaluma. As he finished speaking, a woman stood up and said she wanted to thank the American soldier.

She had crawled across the Czech-German border in 1960, when she was 16 years old. Ahead of her in the mud was her 12-year-old sister. Behind her were their parents. East Bloc guards were stationed in towers every 50 yards. As the family inched its way across no man's land, snipers opened fire. The girls made it to the West. The parents were shot and killed.

The woman who told that story lived in Sebastopol, Bergeron said. She took a picture with the American veteran and sent it to her sister, who lives in Minneapolis.

That moment epitomized the gratitude being offered up at Cypress Hill for the men and women who, as so many speakers noted, made "the ultimate sacrifice" for their government in forests, desert landscapes, open sea and smoky skies.

"Every life given was given in defense of us all, so that we can raise our children in tranquility and live the best lives possible," said LeMarquand, who spent stints as an Army combat engineer, cavalry officer and Ranger. "And looking back through the horrors that we've all experienced as a community, and that our families have experienced, I can say without a doubt that I would do it over again."

As retired Air Force medic Airman Second Class Rose Nowak pointed out, Petaluma lost two more of its veterans in the past year: Bob Hockenberger, a Navy Yeoman in the early 1970s, and Mary Lou Loustalot, a member of the WAVES (a stateside corps of female clerical workers and instructors) during World War II. She died at 97.

Nowak called the sadness of those whose loved ones die in battle "a grief no words can touch."

"We don't have a word in the dictionary for a parent who's lost a child," she said. "So the mothers and fathers of our military fallen call themselves Gold Star parents. ... What could possibly be good enough to say that would convey how truly grateful we are when someone like them had the courage to do what so many others could not and would not do?"

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.

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