CityView Magazine

FEATURE The Moving Wall was on display at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum as part of Fayetteville's Heroes Homecoming celebration in honor of Vietnam veterans last November. Trying Times I The local USO struggled alongside the city during the Vietnam War years Part Two of our Three Part Series highlighting the history of the USO in Fayetteville BY BRYAN MIMS am reluctant to even write the word. As a community we want to excommunicate the city of History, Heroes and a Hometown Feeling. But here goes — Fayettenam. The word might as well be a glaring typo overlooked by an word, to cleanse our collective psyche of it, to accentu- ate the here and now and the what is to come in our editor. It's a smudge, an inkblot, a messy stain on a glossy page. Some of you cringe just to see it there in stark black and white — let alone hear it. But I write the word because it spells out in shorthand a defining period in our city's past. We are a different (and far better) city now, of course. Gone Fayetteville's link and proximity to the Army post oſten sparked anti-war protests on the streets of our town, even lur- ing the most notorious protester of the time, Jane Fonda, on at least three occasions. The churn of draſted G.I.'s fresh out of high school, combined with demonstrations and various out- breaks of misbehavior, earned Fayetteville that unmention- able moniker we're still trying to live down more than four decades later. "There were pool halls, hotels, bar fights and we weren't from downtown are the strip clubs and the seedy beer joints. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, more than 200,000 soldiers passed through Fort Bragg on their way to Vietnam. well accepted in this town in those days, as I recall," veteran Tom Dohnke told me during the Heroes Homecoming parade through downtown Fayetteville in November, a city-wide event to give Vietnam veterans the proper welcome home they never received back then. Dohnke first came through town in 1967, just before he was shipped off to Vietnam. "I was CityViewNC.com | 51

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