Honoring our fallen heroes
Photo by CHANSE WATSON JROTC cadets preform Memorial Day services at Nine Mile Cemetery on Monday.
Courtesy photos Student-cadets from Kellogg High School’s Marine Corps JROTC program placed flags at the gravesites of the veterans buried at Greenwood Cemetery as part of their annual Memorial Day community service.
Students checking each headstone to make sure that no fallen veterans are missed as they place flags.
The Kellogg High School Marine Corps JROTC does a lot of things throughout the year to benefit the community.
Whether it’s color guards at parades, ceremonies or sporting events, or acting as a workforce and doing countless hours of community service, the student cadets are constantly working for the betterment of the Silver Valley.
For Memorial Day, the cadets put in a two-fold effort for the residents of Shoshone County.
It began last weekend when they went up to Greenwood Cemetery in Kellogg, and distributed flags to the gravesites of the many veterans who are buried there.
“The flag placing is sponsored by the American Legion, they are low on local members and many of them are Vietnam-era veterans,” MCJROTC senior Marine instructor Major Craig Petersen said. “We are a perfect fit to take that project off their hands. It gives us a chance to teach and encourage citizenship, giving back and honoring veterans. We feel like this is a great thing for the kids to do and the kids have a really good time doing it.”
The second part of Memorial Day for the JROTC consisted of a tour of the Shoshone County cemeteries on Memorial Day where the cadets performed 21-gun salutes to honor the fallen veterans.
“The 21-gun salute is sponsored by the VFW, and it’s pretty cool for our kids who got to shoot M1-Garands,” Petersen said. “This is something that our kids who plan on going into the military will see, the 21-gun salute, the playing of Taps, whenever a service member dies. But also it is teaching them how to honor a federal holiday.”
Memorial Day often gets lost in the shuffle as the first bookend of the summer camping season, or no different than Veterans Day, but Major Petersen is making sure that his cadets not only understand the difference between the two days, but also understand the magnitude of the day itself.
“If you asked the people out in the community what the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day was, odds are that very few would know the difference,” Petersen said. “That’s part of what we teach, part of our curriculum is making sure they understand the difference. I have countless people come up to me on Memorial Day and thank me for my service, I appreciate that, but that’s not what Memorial Day is about. This generation needs to get taught the difference, it’s a federal holiday and they should understand its meaning.”