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Speakers honor military veterans and terrorist attack heroes during a Memorial Day ceremony at a Land O'Lakes nursing home.
By JAMES THORNER, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 28, 2002
LAND O'LAKES -- A year ago they were little more than unknown civil servants armed with fire hoses and nightsticks.
But in this year of the terrorist attacks, firefighters and police officers earned their stripes in the eyes of some military veterans who gathered Monday in Land O'Lakes to commemorate Memorial Day.
Edward Koh spied for the United States military as a teenager in war-torn Korea 50 years ago. Grateful soldiers sponsored his immigration to the United States. Later he enlisted in the Army.
In a speech at the Baldomero Lopez State Veterans Nursing Home, Koh praised the heroes of Sept. 11, including the men who crash-landed the jet in Pennsylvania as terrorists tried to steer it toward Washington.
"We are going to win this war," Koh told the assembly of about 100 veterans and their families in the shady front entrance way of the nursing home.
U.S. forces will win if they have the guts of Baldomero Lopez. Another guest speaker, Judge E.J. Salcines, recounted Lopez's heroics, which posthumously earned him the Medal of Honor:
Lopez giving up a comfortable stateside job to storm the Inchon peninsula in Korea with his fellow Marines.
Lopez holding the ladder so his men could scale the seawall, inspiring his troops by saying "Follow me up the stairs and over the wall."
Lopez helping take out a pillbox on the beach. Lopez, riddled with machine gun bullets, falling on a live grenade to save his platoon.
"All of you have given something," Salcines said to the veterans, some in wheelchairs, some toting oxygen tanks, some fed intravenously through bottles. "But some give it all."
The ceremony, at the nursing home that bears Lopez's name, lasted about two hours. Another speaker was William Roach, a former fighter pilot who recalled how he tunneled out of a German POW camp in World War II.
U.S. Rep. Karen Thurman added a few words near the end of the ceremony, urging young people to collect stories of aging veterans for inclusion in the Library of Congress' collection.
But Koh sounded the biggest cheers for the red, white and blue. If it hadn't been for U.S. troops, he said, his native South Korea would have yielded to the "darkness of North Korea."
"I don't care what anybody says, this is the most beautiful country in the world," Koh said.