More about this Freitas thing
Feb. 22nd, 2005 09:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7You know, my senior year in university, when I interviewed my father in depth and did a big project and made a website out of his Vietnam experiences, it crossed my mind that maybe, just maybe, some of the people or the children of the people involved might find this website and find some information on it that they hadn't known about.
So I wrote a little disclaimer that I put at the end of the website (it was composed kind of like a book. I was a bit of a twit that way). It said something to the effect that the people and events in the website were real, and if you knew anything about them or in fact were one of them, to please contact me.
The website was dismantled, when I lost hosting, and hasn't been put back up because, frankly, the webdesign was awful and I was sort of ashamed to have stuck such wonderful things onto such a crappy use of technology.
But I still had all the materials, and knowledge that had gone into it.
So come Veteran's Day, I made a post about a little bit of it, the story of all of it that moved me the most, because it was obviously the story that moved Dad the most. He had spoken a great deal about what Vietnam had meant to him, about why he had gone and what he had hoped to accomplish, about what he had learned from it, about where he had been and what he had done. But the one thing that still obviously stuck with him was the story of his sergeant. That was the only story about Vietnam I remember him telling me as a child, when I asked who the man was in the picture on the wall of his office. He said that the man was his sergeant and good friend, and had been killed after he had left, and that he'd always felt really bad because he'd respected the man so much; he felt a little bitter because he had a little nagging feeling that perhaps he could have avoided the incident that led to the man's death had he still been there (the sergeant was acting as a lieutenant because Dad hadn't been replaced: had Dad stayed, they would have moved him anyway, but he still felt bad); and most of all he'd felt awful because the man had several small children that would never get to know him. Dad spoke of him often, and several years ago when he went to Washington D.C. for the first time in his life, he visited the Wall and took a rubbing of the sergeant's name, and stuck it in the frame of the picture.
Today the sergeant's son found my Veteran's Day post. I got an e-mail from him earlier today, which I've posted about: I forwarded it to Dad, who was so excited he sat down and wrote a reply immediately. And I just got a comment on the post from the sergeant's daughter, who was only 3 at the time of his death. She hadn't known the full story.
Here is the Veteran's Day post about SFC Robert Freitas.
So I wrote a little disclaimer that I put at the end of the website (it was composed kind of like a book. I was a bit of a twit that way). It said something to the effect that the people and events in the website were real, and if you knew anything about them or in fact were one of them, to please contact me.
The website was dismantled, when I lost hosting, and hasn't been put back up because, frankly, the webdesign was awful and I was sort of ashamed to have stuck such wonderful things onto such a crappy use of technology.
But I still had all the materials, and knowledge that had gone into it.
So come Veteran's Day, I made a post about a little bit of it, the story of all of it that moved me the most, because it was obviously the story that moved Dad the most. He had spoken a great deal about what Vietnam had meant to him, about why he had gone and what he had hoped to accomplish, about what he had learned from it, about where he had been and what he had done. But the one thing that still obviously stuck with him was the story of his sergeant. That was the only story about Vietnam I remember him telling me as a child, when I asked who the man was in the picture on the wall of his office. He said that the man was his sergeant and good friend, and had been killed after he had left, and that he'd always felt really bad because he'd respected the man so much; he felt a little bitter because he had a little nagging feeling that perhaps he could have avoided the incident that led to the man's death had he still been there (the sergeant was acting as a lieutenant because Dad hadn't been replaced: had Dad stayed, they would have moved him anyway, but he still felt bad); and most of all he'd felt awful because the man had several small children that would never get to know him. Dad spoke of him often, and several years ago when he went to Washington D.C. for the first time in his life, he visited the Wall and took a rubbing of the sergeant's name, and stuck it in the frame of the picture.
Today the sergeant's son found my Veteran's Day post. I got an e-mail from him earlier today, which I've posted about: I forwarded it to Dad, who was so excited he sat down and wrote a reply immediately. And I just got a comment on the post from the sergeant's daughter, who was only 3 at the time of his death. She hadn't known the full story.
Here is the Veteran's Day post about SFC Robert Freitas.
