Allan Appel Photo
Vietnam vet Reginald Jackson makes the first trek to the Long Wharf monument.
Reginald Jackson is a Vietnam Marine Corps vet whose birthday also happens to be on Nov. 11 — aka Veterans Day.
On Thursday afternoon Jackson came for the first time in his life to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Long Wharf and placed his hands on the names of his friends, fellow Wilbur Cross High School classmates who served in Vietnam but never made it back, engraved on the stone beneath the V.
Jackson was one of 50 people in attendance for a serious yet not somber Veterans Day commemoration organized by the National Veterans Council for Legal Redress (NVCLR) and keynoted by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.
Blumenthal spoke emotionally about the NVCLR, which refers vets to assistance for social, housing, vocational, and counseling services.
The organization’s origins lay in helping vets to upgrade their “bad paper,” as less than honorable discharges are known. Those discharges often resulted, Blumenthal and other speakers said, of undiagnosed PTSD.
“So much work remains to be done,” he said, citing the special need at the moment to address concerns of vets of the Afghan war just concluded.
“The withdrawal has created pressures,” the senator said. “We withdrew from Afghanistan but we are proud of you. You served honorably. This war has ended, but we owe you a debt of gratitude and we will stand with you, as Conley Monk did.”
Monk (of New Haven’s famous musical Monk family, many of whom were in attendance) is the founder of the NVCLR. Blumenthal helped Monk navigate the Washington and Defense Department bureaucracy; that effort resulted in Monk’s upgrade of his discharge and made him, finally, eligible for veterans’ benefits. That became the template for the founding of the organization.
In addition to speeches of appreciation, the day belonged equally to vets like Jackson, who served between 1968 – 1969 with a Marine helicopter squadron stationed at Da Nang. He was one of those soldiers you see in films of the war who rush out when a Medevac helicopter lands, and helps attend to the wounded brought back from the field.
“It’s a difficult balance,” he said of being born on Veterans Day and remembering Cross friends like Henry Robinson. Jackson said he first heard about Robinson’s death, which took place a year earlier, in a letter he received from Robinson’s mother: “It was crushing.”
When Jackson returned from Vietnam, he went on to a career of 35 years in U.S. Postal Service. While there he took night courses at Southern and graduated with a degree in social work. He finished off his next career working for six years with the state’s Department of Children and Families.
After the speeches, when chairs had been removed from the podium area, Jackson made his way to the red granite stone containing the names of Robinson and another Cross classmate, Calvin Belton, and touched them with a finger.
Jackson: A birthday balancing act.
“I took a tracing of their names in Washington,” Jackson said. But this was the first time he had made this visit. He stepped back and took pictures.
“How do you balance it?” he said, trying finally to find an answer to a reporter’s question. “That’s why I’m on the Hamden Veterans Commission.”
Jackson had spent his birthday morning — he turned 74 Thursday — helping to preside over Hamden’s celebration of Veterans Day at their monument, which stands in front of the Hamden Middle School on Dixwell Avenue.
In an announcement at the end of the speeches at Long Wharf, Air Force vet and NVCLR Executive Director Gary Monk said the group’s next big initiative will be to erect a monument, near the V, for living vets.
The proceedings also featured the reading of proclamations in honor of the day and of the Monks’ leadership from the Board of Alders, offered by Hill Alder Carmen Rodriguez; and on behalf of the city, presented by Mayor Justin Elicker.