Every Friday, members of Jaffrey’s VFW Post 5613 wear red shirts to honor military personnel currently serving on active duty assignments.
“Red Friday,” as it’s called, is about supporting the men and women who “raise their hand and answer their nation’s call,” said Post Commander Dale Smith.
This past Friday held extra significance, though, as the veterans shared memories of lost friends and fellow soldiers at a ceremony in honor of National POW-MIA Day, which falls on the third Friday of September. It honors prisoners of war and those who are still missing in action.
“Not everyone deployed goes into a combat zone of a foreign conflict, but everyone deployed takes that risk. Until they come home, we will not forget. These shirts are a visible reminder of the men and women who are deployed away from their homes and their families,” Smith said. “When we wear red, we recognize not only those currently serving around the world, but also their families and their husbands and their wives and their children and their parents, who also carry the burden of a deployment. Everyone in this post knows what that is like.”
Smith said that every VFW post keeps a table in memory of POWs and MIAs. Each part of the table setting has a different meaning.
“As a symbol of continued determination to account for POWs and MIAs, this table represents a powerful history and symbolism,” Smith said. “Slice of lemon represents their bitter fate. The salt that is sprinkled represents the tears of their families and loved ones. The inverted glass reminds us that we cannot share this gathering with them, and the empty chair represents a chair they can no longer occupy. The candle represents the light that continues to shine.”
Smith said there are still 80,000 American POWs and MIAs who are unaccounted for.
“Here in Jaffrey and Rindge, those words, that there are 80,000 unaccounteed for, have a personal meaning,” Smith said.
POWs and MIAs from Jaffrey and Rindge include Ralph Lavoie, a B-17 turret gunner who was shot down in 1943 and held prisoner in a German Stalag for 15 months before returning home to Jaffrey.
Rick Lambert shared memories of Lavoie, who died in 2009.
“I knew Ralph pretty well. He was very active in the post,” Lambert said. “He was at Stalag 7, and he had a very serious injury in an escape attempt from the prison, and that’s why he walked with a limp until he died.”
Lambert also spoke about Thomas Van Campen, a member of the 173rd Airborne, who was killed in Vietnam in 1965 at age 19 and is an honorary member of Post 5613, and Norman Billop, a Marine pilot who was shot down over the Vietnam/Laos border in 1969.
Jaffrey was also home to Charles Ouellette, who was captured in the Battle of the Bulge and held prisoner and liberated in 1945, and Sanderson Sloane, whose plane was shot down over Germany in 1945.
Sloane’s parents, Douglas and Sibyl Sanderson Sloane, created Cathedral of the Pines in Rindge in honor of their son and all veterans.
For more information about the VFW, go to: https://www.vfw.org.
