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BY MARC LEEPSON, photos by Michael Keating
When you attend a VVA National Leadership Conference, you
have to make choices. And that was certainly true with this
year’s LC, which took place July 16-19 at the Hyatt
Regency in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. With many
of the three dozen seminars offered concurrently over four
days, conferees had to prioritize. On Thursday morning at
9:00, for example, Jim Lynch, the President of Chapter 905
in Porter County, Indiana, decided to take in the two-part
Heath Care Issues seminar. It dealt with hepatitis C and
Agent Orange and birth defects. Lynch, a veteran of eight
VVA Conventions and Leadership Conferences, is mighty glad
he chose that session.
“One of our members has a son in his forties who has
several birth defects,” Lynch said later that day, “and
he wants to do an Agent Orange claim. I learned exactly how
to do that on line at the second part of that seminar,” which
was presented by Betty Mekdeci of the American Birth Defects
Registry. “I am so excited,” Lynch said. “I
can’t wait to get home and tell him. Getting that information
was worth the whole trip here for me.”
Lynch’s experience mirrored those of many of the three-hundred-plus
VVA members who took part in the Leadership Conference and
who took in as many seminars as they could pack into their
busy schedules. That was the case even if what was on the
agenda—how to be an effective board of directors member,
for example, or how to recruit and retain new members, or
how to be a grassroots lobbyist—covered material already
familiar to many members.
“It’s important for every chapter to come here,” said
Tim Driscoll, the president of Washtenaw County, Michigan,
Chapter 310. “We have to continue to learn how important
the details are in our advocacy work. We are getting older
and it’s crucial that those who can still do a lot
come here and get re-energized. We’ve made a commitment
to our chapter members. We have to keep those promises.”
Or
as Ned Foote, the New York State Council President and a
veteran Leadership Conference goer, put it: “No matter
how many seminars you go to, you always learn something.”
An
added bonus this year: the city of Greenville, in the Northwestern
South Carolina Piedmont, warmly welcomed VVA, along with
the Associates of Vietnam Veterans of America, which was
having its biennial Convention, and the Veterans of Modern
Warfare, which was having its Founding Convention in conjunction
with the LC. Many of the merchants and eateries along bustling
Main Street just outside the hotel proudly posted signs welcoming
VVA; some offered discounts; just about all offered friendly
greetings.
“Just walking outside the hotel was an adventure in
good eating, good people, and good fun,” VVA President
John Rowan remarked during the Closing Ceremonies. “It’s
been a real pleasure to be here.”
The Conference kicked
off Wednesday morning with stirring Opening Ceremonies that
featured a strak Color Guard from Chapter 172 in Cumberland,
Maryland; a rousing National Anthem and “God Bless
America” sung by Michelle DellaFave
and Lindsay Bloom; greetings from South Carolina State Council
President Avery Taylor, AVVA President Mary Miller, and VMW
President Julie Mock; Rowan’s welcoming remarks (in
which he dubbed the event “VVA’s Summer School”);
and an inspiring Keynote from motivational speaker Bridget
Cooper, who went on to lead a series of seminars during the
next three days.
The seminars themselves began right after
the opening ceremonies and continued until noontime on Saturday.
Nearly all were jam packed with conference attendees. All
offered expert advice on myriad aspects of veteran advocacy.
At the 9:00 a.m. Thursday seminar on grassroots advocacy,
for example, Pat Welch, a VVA Board member who is vice chair
of the Government Relations Committee, and Tom Insley, who
also co-vice chairs the committee and is a member of the
Maryland State Veterans Commission, brought their combined
decades of experience to a large group of VVA members from
around the country.
In
90 minutes of lively give and take, Welch and Insley engaged
audience members, most of whom were experienced in veterans’ advocacy
work on their local and state levels. VVA members from Iowa,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, New York, Indiana,
Arizona, Michigan, Illinois, and elsewhere shared valuable
lobbying tips, ranging from what to wear when you visit a
legislator’s office to what to say when you get there.
After
that, at a 10:45 seminar on PTSD, Tom Berger, who chairs
VVA’s national PTSD/Substance Abuse Committee, introduced “a
good friend of VVA,” Dr. Matt Friedman, one of the
nation’s top PTSD experts. Dr. Friedman, who heads
the VA’s National Center for PTSD and teaches at Dartmouth
Medical School, praised the full house of VVA members.
“Thanks
to your support we hope to continue” working on the
full range of PTSD issues, he said. He went on to present
a detailed picture of what the National Center does and spoke
a good deal about emotional readjustment issues among the
newest generation of veterans.
“Everyone, to some degree, is having some re-entry
issues,” Dr. Friedman said. “Although there are
going to be problems, most will come through to the other
side, but significant numbers won’t—about 15
percent.”
The Conference’s concluding event, the
Saturday night Awards Banquet and Dance, drew a big crowd
of VVA, AVVA, and VMW members. They took note of VVA’s
30th anniversary and showed their appreciation for this year’s
award winners—before rocking the night away to Endless
Summer, the Indiana band that was a big hit at the National
Convention in Springfield, Illinois, last year.
Craig Venter, the pioneering
research scientist who decoded the humane genome and who
served as a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, received the first
VVA Excellence in the Sciences Award. Bobbie Keith and Chris
Noel, who entertained the troops in Vietnam on TV (“Bobbie
the Weather Girl”) and
radio (“A Date With Chris”), received VVA President’s
Awards for Excellence in the Arts. And former Marine Bill
Ehrhart, the award-winning poet, memoirist, and teacher,
took home the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award.
That award,
Ehrhart said, echoing Venter’s comments, “means
more to me that any other honor I’ve ever received
because it comes from my peers—my brothers and sisters—my
fellow veterans.”
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