Vietnam veteran posthumously awarded Bronze Star

Vietnam veteran posthumously awarded Bronze Star
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
By RICHARD LAKE
September 3, 2013

On the desk in a room in the back corner of a congresswoman’s office Tuesday sat a series of medals and a folded U.S. flag.

Johnnette Fafard held those medals, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart and others, and she passed them to her grandchildren.

What’s it feel like? one of the TV reporters asked her. What’s it like to finally have them after all this time?

Fafard smiled and said those medals would have meant more if her husband, the man to whom they should have been awarded, were still alive. But he is not, and so they would now be passed along to the children. The children smiled and held the medals as Fafard looked at them.

“Isn’t that a wonderful thing for you to see?” she said to the TV cameras. “I think it is.”

Johnnette met Raymond Fafard when they were children growing up in Hawaii.

In 1969, Raymond was drafted into the Army. He went to Vietnam, where he served as a light-weapons soldier. He was there for a year, from March 31, 1970, to April 9, 1971.

When he came back, the two married. Raymond worked as a tour bus driver. But only a few months later, symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder kicked in. He suffered for years, and eventually sought help from the Veterans Administration in 1979.

Medications, a misdiagnosis and a series of rejections from the VA followed. He was finally declared 100 percent disabled in 2001 because of his PTSD claim. The couple moved to Las Vegas in 2005 to be closer to family.
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