Forgotten Warrior Museum
About Us: By Bill Craft, Director
What is Forgotten Warriors about? I don’t have to remind most of you what happened after Vietnam. No welcome home, no thanks. In some cases we were almost ashamed to be known as a Vietnam vet and didn’t talk about it for years.
How could something that made such a dramatic effect on our lives be hidden away? No one wanted to talk about it even with friends and relatives.
Skip forward 35 years and now we are aging baby boomers. I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend a Vietnam reunion of the Army’s 121st Assault Helicopter Company (AHC), know as the “Soc Trang Tigers” by one of the members that I had been helping set up the 121st web site.
The reunion went like you would expect a reunion to go, old friends meeting after years and just plain old reminiscing about past events. One event stood out however, Major Lyman brought to the reunion a Viking helmet that was signed by all the company members in 1968. He kept it all these years as his remembrance of his fellow company members, many who died on missions out of Soc Trang. To all who attended this reunion, this helmet kept alive the memory of their fallen comrades.
Major Lyman left the reunion to go back to his home in California. About half way to the airport in Newark he turned around and came back to Cape May to turn over the helmet to Tom Collins. Why? Well Tom had set up a small Vietnam room in the Naval Air Station Wildwood Museum. The room was about the size of a walk-in closet, but contained full sized memories. I was there when Major Lyman turned over the helmet; he said “if I don’t leave this helmet here, it will go into the trash when I am gone”
What a feeling, something that meant so much to him and his fellow company members, would be just trash at the curb when he died. Why?, A hand made Viking helmet, had no value to anyone, it had no historical value as artifacts go. But for him and the members of the 121st it meant more than money could buy, it held memories of a forgotten era.
The “Forgotten Warriors” has been organized to save treasures like the Viking Helmet, for Vietnam vets and others. Our goal is to have a permanent museum to house and display all the treasures that mean so much to Vietnam vets and prevent them from being stored in the local landfill. The museum will be dedicated to remembering Vietnam veterans and recognizing their place in history.
Don’t let your past be forgotten, help build the museum so that yours and other’s memories can be remembered for ever. Save Vietnam memories from being tossed into the landfill to be forgotten once again.
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