'Until everyone is accounted for and returned'

Welling­ton­ian Cpl. Don­ald E. May­baugh, one of only two POW sur­vivors of WWII from Ohio, and hun­dreds of MIA/POW sol­diers from across the state, will be per­ma­nently hon­ored in Wellington.

Blair Miles, POW/MIA chair­man of the Sons of the Amer­i­can Legion, along with the Amer­i­can Legion Post No. 8, have cre­ated a Patio of Honor ded­i­cated to pre­serv­ing the mem­ory and his­tory of an elite group of veterans.

The Patio of Honor sur­rounds the flag­pole in front of the Amer­i­can Legion build­ing and was con­structed in the shape of Ohio. Every paver laid depicts the POW/MIA soldier’s name, home­town, branch of ser­vice and date missing.

“In the state of Ohio, there are 448 ‘un-accounted for’ MIAs from the Korean War and 77 from the Viet­nam War,” Miles said.

The Patio of Honor has a paver for each miss­ing hero, where bricks are darker and lighter to sig­nify the spe­cific war. In the mid­dle of the state-shaped memo­r­ial, there is an ele­vated plat­form for “accounted for” POWs.

“From the state of Ohio, there are 60 ‘accounted for’ POWs from Viet­nam and eight ‘accounted for’ POWs from Korea,” Miles said.

Any sol­dier who returns home from cap­tiv­ity, whether they escaped, walked, came back alive or dead, is con­sid­ered returned.

A sol­dier who went miss­ing in 1950 returned this past Sep­tem­ber and now his paver is ele­vated to the cen­ter plat­form for eternity.

The paver project started last May, when the MIA com­mis­sion of the state of Ohio wanted POW/MIA chair­man Miles to do a spe­cial project in honor of the lost heroes.

“The local legion had their gun raf­fle and all the pro­ceeds were to go to this new project. It was an astro­nom­i­cal amount of funds, but I didn’t have an idea yet,” Miles said.

The first thing Miles did was research. The web­site www.dtic.mil/dpmo had state by state and war by war break­downs for all the POW/MIA soldiers.

Once Miles got an idea of the num­bers in Ohio, a patio made sense and the project was underway.

The Patio of Honor was orig­i­nally going to be con­structed along the side of the build­ing, but Miles was con­cerned about smok­ers stand­ing out­side the build­ing, and wanted it to be special.

“It used to just be a flag pole out here, so I thought of it as a chal­lenge,” Miles said.

The per­ma­nence of the patio serves as a con­stant reminder of the sac­ri­fice of so many, and the need to be aware of how fewer and fewer sol­diers are MIA.

“Oper­a­tion Iraqi Free­dom, which just ended, had only one offi­cial MIA,” Miles said.

“War has evolved, MIA is unac­cept­able. It’s like drop­ping your kids off at the sit­ter. When you go back to pick them up, they say, I don’t know where he is, he’s gone. You wouldn’t accept that. No one would,” Miles said.

There were dif­fer­ent addi­tions and tweaks to the project that led to a side­walk fundraiser, where res­i­dents could buy a paver for the side­walk lead­ing out to the patio, and per­son­al­ize it with a name or mes­sage of their choice.

The public’s inter­est and sup­port led to the con­struc­tion of two World War benches, and plans to honor more sol­diers from past wars are in the mix.

“There are still 800 more bricks that can be pur­chased, and we’re not mak­ing money on this. All branches of ser­vice are rec­og­nized and we’ll be expand­ing into other wars as well,” Miles said.

Do to the sad truth of America’s POW/MIAs, Miles can keep adding on to the project.

“There’s still more to do, unfor­tu­nately, we can keep going on this,” Miles said.

by ADAM FOX

Enter­prise reporter

Posted by Adam Fox on May 31 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.