Emily is at Gabriel A. Rodriquez American Legion Post 1928. Tomorrow is the WNY Veterans Parade. She is with Debra Ransom who is on the committee for the parade. Debra says the parade kicks off at 11am. She says they will be coming down McKinley Parkway all the way to the Buffalo Botanical Gardens.
Andrea Anderson, Grand Marshall, Army veteran and police officer signed up for the Army when she was 18 years old. She was a medical specialist at the time, and it was called nine-one Bravo and she was shipped to Korea. She served over there and then she went to Fort Knox, Kentucky where she finished out her active enlistment and then she signed up for the Kentucky National Guard. She says when she wanted to come back home to Buffalo, she enlisted in the New York National Guard. Andrea says she was humbled when she was asked to be one of the Grand Marshalls.
Benigio V. Rodriquez, American Legion Post 1928 commander served during the Vietnam war. He says his experience serving overseas was on a ship. He was sent from Memphis, Tennessee to the USS Watt in Rhode Island. It had a lot of trips. They had to go out for practice and that, for anything and we had to go on the other side to go to Vietnam but we practiced on the east coast.
Benigio says coming home, was very emotional with me because of my brother. He says I had a brother that came back from Vietnam and he was never right. When he came back he didn’t know where to go to, and Benigio says the services weren’t available. He says they would send him to the V.A. and the V.A. didn’t know what to do with him. They would send him to ECMC and he was always back and forth, back and forth. He says they just didn’t know what the problem was. It is important to Benigio to push for more services for our veterans. When he thinks of PTSD I think about my brother because he was very special to us. Benigio says he has gotten involved and he going to continue to be involved because this non-stopping thing, because of the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, it’s Afghanistan, it’s all these different wars.
Information at Vets Hero 716-901-0773
