'It's important not to forget these people': Local veterans to be honored in new plaza - pressherald.com

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The new plaza will be located on the Mall in Downtown Brunswick will honor veterans for their service. Contributed / veteransplaza.info

BRUNSWICK — Robert Lavallee Jr. only had 30 days to go before he was scheduled to return from Vietnam. He had one just more assignment, but he never made it home.

His younger brother, Peter Lavallee, was watching football with his mother on a fall night in 1967 when an Army car pulled into the driveway. He went into the kitchen to get something and saw two soldiers get out. He called out to his mother.

“She knew then and there that it wasn’t good,” Lavallee said.

They heard first that Robert Lavallee Jr. was missing in action. Later the designation would be changed to killed in action, and Peter Lavellee, his parents and siblings became a gold star family.

“It’s a nice honor to have, but it’s a harsh honor to have,” Lavallee said recently during a video interview to help promote Brunswick’s new Veterans Plaza.

His brother died in 1967, but, Lavallee said, it “never goes away.”

“He was a local boy, born and raised in Brunswick. … I want my brother’s name to be remembered.”

Robert Lavallee Jr. will be honored alongside more than 400 other veterans, living and dead, next week when Brunswick’s Veterans Plaza is officially unveiled. The group is hosting a private dedication ceremony on Wednesday, Veterans Day, which will be livestreamed for the public to watch from home due to the coronavirus.

The $500,000 monument was designed by Richardson and Associates, the firm that also designed the Chamberlain memorial. It includes 445 engraved granite “honor blocks” honoring individual veterans with their names, branch and dates of service or conflict fought in, but not their rank.

The new veterans plaza incorporates the existing downtown monument, which has been rotated 180 degrees, as well as a separately funded purple heart monument. Twelve sentinel posts surrounding the plaza will represent the 12 recognized major American conflicts spanning the American Revolution through the Global War on Terror.

The plaza “keeps the spirit alive of everyone that was lost,” Lavallee said in the video. “My brother’s name is going to live on. … It’s important not to forget these people.”

Joe Donahue, a US Navy veteran who served three tours in Vietnam, agreed.

“It’s going to be a place when you go in there, you’re going to feel the presence and awe of what transpired in the past,” he said in another video.

Donahue enlisted when he was just 17 and said his 24 years of service shaped his life and helped him fall in love with his country.

“The commitment you make when you go into the military … one of the hardest things you have to do is leave your family,” he said. “You worry about them more than you do about yourself.”

But he also made lifelong friends, he said — friends he can pick right back up with after decades apart. They reminisce and it’s always the good things they remember.

He hopes the Veterans Plaza does the same thing for people, even if there are hard memories attached too.

“They’ll be able to go in there, sit down and look at the different conflicts that the country was involved in,” Donahue said. “…It’s a place that you’re going to go in there, sit down, relax and think back. Think back on the good times and not necessarily the bad. Think about your friends.”