Ceremonies honor veterans

VILLAGE OF FAYETTEVILLE – On Veterans Day a pair of ceremonies in Fayetteville honored those who have served with flag raisings, rifle volley salutes, wreath layings and the playing of the “Taps” bugle call.
The brief ceremonies were hosted by the color guard from Manlius Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 7872, which was represented at different spots around town.
They were joined at each site by Paul Hrynio from the Onondaga County Veterans Council.
After attending the morning Onondaga County War Memorial ceremony and conducting its own at the Korean War/Vietnam War monument in downtown Syracuse and at the local Brookdale retirement facilities, VFW Post 7872 stopped by the Towne Center Resort Lifestyles community on Medical Center Drive to perform an outdoor ceremony by the main entrance and flagpole.
Inside the Resort Lifestyles building, there’s a year-round “Wall of Honor” with pictures of current residents and residents’ deceased husbands who served as lieutenants, staff sergeants, paratroopers and corporals in the Army, Navy, Coast Guard and Air Force, mostly during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
That same evening of Nov. 11, there was a ceremony at the triangular Veterans Memorial Park in the center of the village of Fayetteville, right next to the village hall and firehouse.
As cars went by on each side of the park, some stopping for a moment to witness the ceremony, Fayetteville Mayor Mike Small read a proclamation recognizing “the enduring commitment and dedication” of the veterans who work and live in the community, as well as the unforgotten heroes who never returned home from battlefields around the world and those whose families still wait.
“The POW/MIA flag serves as a reminder to all that we are the fortunate heirs of the legacy that our unreturned heroes helped to forge,” Small read to those gathered. “These service members gave all, risked all and dared all to protect our freedom.”
Mark Olson, the county legislator for the 10th District, was there at the Fayetteville ceremonies as well. He called the observances of Veterans Day “beautiful tributes” and noted the presence of veterans who have gone on Honor Flight Syracuse missions as well as local widows of servicemen.
“Today has just been an emotional day, because these guys [from the VFW post] have been focusing on the spouses and families who have sacrificed so much,” said Olson, whose grandfather and father were in the U.S. Army and whose uncle was a Navy admiral. “We just cannot do enough and say ‘thank you’ enough.”
After the Veterans Park ceremony, the VFW post got together at the Red Robin restaurant in Towne Center with other veterans to hand out poppies, which are symbols of remembrance for those who’ve served and the sacrifices they’ve made, inspired by the John McCrae war poem “In Flanders Fields.”
The following day, during the Fayetteville Village Board’s Nov. 12 meeting, Deputy Mayor Mark Matt said the ceremony in Veterans Park was “really quite special” and “very meaningful.”
Matt’s mother and father were both World War II veterans, he said, his father a Marine and his mother an Army nurse in England. Having been an assistant dean of students at SUNY Brockport responsible for helping to reacclimate veterans to campus, Matt said he has known many friends who have served and that they have helped to secure the country and move it forward, adding, “The personal debt we have to these people, we can never repay.”