MEMORIAL DAY: Military veterans, families honor Dayton area’s ‘garden of heroes’

About a dozen others were injured and aided by medical crews who were relatively new, “mostly junior nurses and docs and enlisted medics. And many of them saw war zone death for the first time,” he added. “I hope their memories of 18 June 2013 have grown less burdensome with time.”

Sonnek was the keynote speaker at the event that drew a few hundred observers. His career has included helping military populations primarily in the areas of occupational stress and post-deployment adjustment.

He recalled a monument in a 19th century Maryland cemetery that honored fallen vets. The monument’s inscription said, in part, “dream of battlefields no more” in “describing post traumatic stress symptoms” about 80 years before that phrase was coined.

“What’s so striking to me — and I hope you — is over the years, the centuries, the weaponry has changed, it’s advanced,” Sonnek said. “But the people wielding those weapons — what they deal with, the effects of those battlefields — are largely the same.”

The Dayton Veterans Affairs cemetery is also steeped in history, Montgomery County Common Pleas Court Judge Dennis Adkins said.

Adkins, who started the first veterans’ treatment court in the Dayton area, said the site had its first burial in 1867 and “is full of historic significance.” It includes five medal of honor recipients among about 60,000 buried there, he added.

The West Third Street site is “a garden of heroes,” said cemetery Director Doug Ledbetter. Those interred there are among more than 1 million veterans who have died since before this country’s Revolutionary War, he said.

Their military service “was not to seek personal gain or a path to fame. Their country called and they answered,” Ledbetter said.

It was “a simple patriotic response which had such momentous consequences for their own lives and for the ultimate freedom we enjoy today,” he added.

“We honor them by remembering. Remembering that they loved America,” Ledbetter said, “So they served far from its shores.”