By Scott Edger
Little Apple Post
The Flint Hills Veterans Coalition’s Veterans Day Parade is the biggest one in the state, and Melody Sexton, FHVC publicity director, said this year’s festivities will be bigger than ever.
A celebration that was once just a parade is “now more like a whole day,” Sexton said.
In addition to the parade, a beloved Manhattan tradition with well over a thousand participants, the FHVC is throwing their first-ever VetFest, starting right after the parade at 10:30 at City Park.
According to Sexton, the community’s sincere respect for veterans and how it embraces veteran’s recognition and celebration was the motivation to present its first-ever VetFest celebration.
She related a story from a frozen Veterans Day from a couple years back. Despite the near-zero wind chills, Sexton said there were still a couple hundred dedicated diehards lining the parade route.
“To see those people out there in that weather,” she said, “that was an incredible show of patriotism by this community.”
The celebration starts early with a breakfast at the Pearce-Keller American Legion Post, cooked every year by the Monsignor Luckey Knights of Columbus. Veterans and active-duty military eat free, a $5 donation is suggested for everyone else.
The FHVC theme for Veteran’s Day 2021 is “Thirty Years After the Storm”, commemorating the 30th anniversary of Desert Storm. Sexton said that the Desert Storm and Viet Nam veteran dynamic is a complex and heartfelt one: the Desert Storm generals just young soldiers during Viet Nam, vowing to never allow American soldiers to be sacrificed so needlessly. They led that generation’s young soldiers in the first major US combat operations since the Viet Nam War.
“And look at what an unequivocal success that was,” Sexton said. “They were committed to their men and determined that their soldeiers were not going to be treated like they were.”
This year for the first time, organizers have facilitated various groups of veterans who will band together and lead the procession. The parade will run from the Manhattan Town Center to City Hall starting at 9:30 a.m.
The National Guard will be putting up artillery and huge Army tents, while Kansas State University Army and Air Force ROTC cadets will monitor not one but four bounce houses on site.
Fort Riley is expected to bring out several artillery and mechanized units and the General’s Mounted Color Guard.