Memories Of Vietnam Come Home To Manchester

Memories Of Vietnam Come Home To Manchester With The Wall That Heals
Hartford Courant
Jesse Leavenworth
October 6, 2015

After the start of the Iraq War in 2003, Simmons said he was determined to protect service members from the scorn heaped on veterans of his era.

MANCHESTER — On that indelible winter's day, Ann Marie Krajewski rushed to answer the doorbell with all the innocent enthusiasm of a 5-year-old.

Uniformed men stood outside, and her parents told her to go play, the now 52-year-old Ann Marie Grottke recalled Monday. Moments later, "I could hear my father burst out crying," Grottke said. "I never heard my father cry before."

U.S. Army Spec. 4 Donald Joseph Krajewski, Ann Marie's 19-year-old brother, was killed in Vietnam on Feb. 28, 1969. His remains were returned home on what would have been his 20th birthday, March 13.

Along with other men from Manchester, Krajewski's name is inscribed on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and on the replica that is scheduled to arrive in town Wednesday.

The Wall That Heals, a 250-foot-long traveling monument, is designed to bring the names home, allowing "the souls enshrined on the Memorial to exist once more among family and friends in the peace and comfort of familiar surroundings," according to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

The keynote speaker for the opening ceremony is former U.S. Congressman Rob Simmons, a U.S. Army veteran who served 19 months in Vietnam and earned two Bronze Stars. Simmons also was a CIA operations officer in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
read more here