By Tim Gardner
Active military personnel, retired veterans and families of fallen soldiers, along with grateful civilians, gathered Monday afternoon in Avery County for its annual Memorial Day ceremony to remember those slain from the county and across America in a foreign war.
The event is held every year on the Avery County/Newland Town Square, whichfeatures its veterans’ monument with names of all county natives who served during a military conflict and in which war. The county/town square also highlights Armed Forces flags displays and gardens and the Fallen Officers, Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and Ten Commandments monuments.
The ceremony is organized and conducted by the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and Auxiliary Pat Ray Post 4286, in Newland. Approximately 200 attended this year.
The 2023 ceremony’s opening remarks were given by its emcee, Retired United States Army Sergeant Kevin Holden, VFW Pat Ray Post 4286 Commander, Desert Shield/Desert Storm (the liberation of Kuwait from Iraq) veteran and former Editor of the North Carolina Veterans of Foreign Wars Leader Magazine.
An invocation followed from Reverend Larry Dale Stamey, a veteran of the US Army who served during the Vietnam Conflict and Pat Ray Post 4286 Chaplain.
A Posting of Colors by the Avery High School JROTC was also presented during the ceremony and the National Anthem was sung by Tara Andrews and Stephanie Watson.
The keynote speaker for the ceremony was Cindy Stonebraker Reed,theFounding Director and Board Secretary for Mission: POW-MIA, (Prisoners of War/Missing In Action) a non-profit organization based in Virginia that connects and serves the families of America’s POW/MIA’s and to help end the uncertainty faced by generations of America’s POW/MIA Families.
Stonebraker Reed also served as the Assistant Director of Programs for the Woody Williams Foundation, overseeing the building of Gold Star Families Memorial Monuments in all 50 states.
Additionally, she is also a founding member of a Gold Star Families Services Coalition, which brought together other organizations that served Gold Star Families, and she sat on the Board of Directors for the National League of POW/MIA Families, in Washington DC, and served as the Board Secretary and Kentucky State Coordinator.
She is married to retired United States Navy Chief Petty Officer Wesley Reed, an Avery County native. They reside in Newland, and have four children and two grandchildren. Wesley and Cindy Stonebraker Reed are members of Banner Elk Presbyterian Church.
And if Memorial Day signified something beyond recognizing the nation’s debt to prisoners of war and those who never came home, it is the acknowledgment of the debt owed to those they left behind – the family members who have had no grave to visit and no closure for a wound that has remained open for decades.
Stonebraker Reed told the crowd at the ceremony what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a missing service member.
Her father, US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Stonebraker, became missing in action from Vietnam while flying a reconnaissance mission over North Vietnam. He took off from Udorn Airfield in Thailand on October 28, 1968 and never returned.
The date was ten days after her birthday, and her last memory of him was a dollhouse he bought for her birthday before he went missing.
The word, “missing” would be her cross to bear for all the years to come. It made her different from other children, especially when her mother moved the family to a northern California area.
“POWMIA,” Stonebraker Reed said it as a word. “This year will mark 55 years my father has been missing in Vietnam. No crash site was ever found and no remains ever recovered. It was something we didn’t talk about at home and we certainly didn’t talk about it in public.
“Kids I grew up with didn’t know anyone in the military, certainly didn’t know anyone lost in military service and had no idea about anybody being missing.”
When sharing more of her story of specifics about, and times involving her father, she will be addressed in this article by just her maiden name since she was not married then. After she finishes telling them and when appropriate, she will be addressed again by both her maiden and current last name.
For more than four decades, Stonebraker felt isolated and alone with a pain that had no end and no explanation.
But in 2012, Stonebraker’s life would change. While driving from Hopkinsville, Kentucky to Clarksville, Tennessee, she stopped at a rest stop to get a map of Land Between the Lakes to take her son to see the bison.
“All I wanted was a map,” she commented. “When I got there, there were seven Rolling Thunder Motorcycle members hoisting the POW/MIA flag. When they got done, for the first time, I said, ‘My father is still missing in Vietnam,’ and they embraced me. They told me that I was the reason they did what they did, and my dad hadn’t been forgotten.”
A couple of months later, the motorcycle club members called Stonebraker and asked her if she would join them for a POW/MIA Recognition ceremony in Americus, Georgia. The event was called “The Ride Home,” and the club invited family members of those who are missing or were prisoners of war for a weekend to be honored.
She was hesitant about going, and family members were also leery about her going from Kentucky to Georgia to meet up with the motorcycle club members again and others she had never met. But she said, “I had this gut feeling that I needed to go, so I got in my car and I drove to Americus, Georgia.’
When she got to the event, the motorcycle club members she had met were there and she met seven people she had never known before, who like her, were people she could talk to about her father because they, too, had family members who were missing in action.
“That weekend forever changed my life,” she proclaimed. “Because of it, I’ve spent several Fathers Days in Washington, D.C., at the Vietnam Memorial Wall. All of us brothers and sisters walk hand-in-hand, and we stop at every daddy’s name.”
Stonebraker eventually got all of her father’s military records, and he has a memorial marker at the Arlington National Cemetery.
Stonebraker also visited a plane like the one her father flew, and attended a reunion of tactical recon Vietnam-era pilots like her father, finding not just one, but three men who knew him.
“As you could imagine, I had a million questions, and they were so gracious about answering them…all the things I wanted to know, what was his favorite color, what was his first car, was he good at math (mathematics), what kind of music did he like… questions like those,” Stonebraker told.
And after all the years of doubt and pain, she wondered if they were just telling her what she wanted to hear, until one asked her, “How did you like your dollhouse?”
He had been with her father when he bought the present in Thailand, and she asked him how he could possibly remember such a thing.
He explained that it was memorable for him because it was a rare moment of normalcy in the chaos and destruction of war. And it was times like those when she realized how many others were affected by her father’s disappearance.
Several years ago, Stonebraker found a few reel-to-reel tapes in her mother’s attic.
They were tapes from her father while he was in Vietnam. His voice, which she hadn’t heard in decades, was finally discovered again.
The problem was, Stonebraker didn’t have a way to listen to them and she didn’t know exactly what messages they would include. But she eventually found a service in Nashville, Tennessee in 2014 that could transfer the tapes to a digital format so she could listen to them.
Before the tapes were returned though, the man who transferred them had a request for Stonebraker as she shared: “He had called me and said, ‘When is your birthday? I told him it was October 18th, and he said that I would have it by then, but you’re not allowed to open it before then.’
While it was extremely hard to keep herself from opening the box, she agreed not to do so before her birthday.
When she opened the box on her birthday in 2014, a tape lay on top that said, “Play this one first,” Stonebraker said.
In a heart-touching and emotional tribute to her father that also brought tears to the eyes of many at the Memorial Day ceremony, Stonebraker Reed played that audio clip from that tape over the loud speaker, which was the last one her father sent before disappearing.
“Hi, Cindy, how are you?” Kenneth Stonebraker said into the tape. “I just got the tape and you talked about your birthday party and it sounded like you really had a good time. Had a birthday party at school, huh? And the teacher made you a crown to wear on your head? I bet you really liked that, huh? And all the kids sang you happy birthday, isn’t that nice?”
He then paused.
“Hey, you guy, you ate my cupcake. But you saved me one, huh? Where’d you put it? In the freezer? Well, I’ll have to eat it when I come home on Christmas.”
That tape was recorded on October 24, 1968. Unfortunately, Kenneth Stonebraker would never make it home for that Christmas. Four days later, his plane went down while flying the mission.
His voice noticeably changed as he kept talking to Cindy on the tape with these words: “I love you, Cindy. You be a good girl. I know you’re a good girl. I like the pictures that you drew, too. You’re doing a real nice job on coloring, I’m so proud of you. That’s a good job. You keep it up, OK? You just try and do as good as you can and do everything your teacher says, OK? ‘Cause I think you’re doing real good.”
Cindy Stonebraker Reed said she likes the tone of his voice on the tape.
“You’re hearing a loving daddy talk to his little girl,” she noted. “It’s not the stern military voice of an officer in the Air Force leaving on the mission he’s not going to come home from.”
“At first you cry, but then you hear him talking to you and you think how wonderful to hear his voice and the kind words he’s saying,” Stonebraker Reed added about when she first heard the tape.
Even though her father’s fate has remained unknown, Stonebraker Reed said it hasn’t deterred her efforts to find out what happened on the night of October 28, 1968.
“I know that if I was missing, my daddy would not rest and work to find out what happened to me,” she said.
There are 1,579 POW/MIA from the Vietnam War, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, a number Stonebraker Reed wants to help lower.
“Even if I don’t find out what happened to my dad, if I can keep the issue alive for the others missing from Vietnam and to bring them closure, it makes it worth my efforts,” she stated.
In closing her speech at Avery’s ceremony, Stonebraker Reed urged everybody attending who have living parents to talk to them, ask them questions and be with them all they can, because the time will come when they can no longer do so in their Earthly lives. She also called on the crowd to honor all veterans and tell others in their communities about the veterans who have paid the ultimate sacrifice by giving their lives in a foreign war.
Also addressing the crowd was United States Congress member Virginia Foxx, a Banner Elk resident. Foxx represents North Carolina District Number 5, which includes Avery County. Foxx remarked: “Those who lost their lives fighting for our great nation are due the greatest respect from all of us as they helped ensure we have the freedom we enjoy. Far more than a million military veterans have died fighting for our nation and they are true American heroes.”
Other Avery County officials and dignitaries were also recognized during the ceremony, including the Avery County Commissioners (Chairwoman Martha Hicks, Vice-Chairman Tim Phillips, Dennis Aldridge, Wood Hall (Woody) Young, Jr. and Robert Burleson), County Manager Phillip Barrier, Jr. and County Veterans Service Officer Tara Gragg Daniels.
Holden presented the Robert C. Wiseman Distinguished Patriot Service Award to retired United States Army Captain Eric Bechard. The award is given for exceptional volunteer service to the Pat Ray VFW Post 4286 and Avery County veterans.
The Presentation of Wreaths honoring the county’s military personnel slain in war was conducted by Honor Guard Captain Bill Dean (US Army Retired Sergeant) for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), retired US Marine Corps Sergeant Zeb White for the Disabled American Veterans (DAV) and Gayle Culbreath of the Crossnore Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR).
A Moment of Silence for the perished Avery County veterans led by Holden was followed by a rifle salute conducted by the Pat Ray Post 4286 Honor Guard.
“Echo Taps,” was played by two youth trumpeters, Ryan Clark and Drew Eggers. Clark and Eggers are members of the Avery County Community Band.
Patriotic music was supplied by the Avery County Community Band, under the direction of Dee Raby. A special rendition of the famous patriotic song written by Country Music artist Lee Greenwood “God Bless the USA” was sung by band member Tim Berry. At Raby’s urging, the crowd sang along on the song’s chorus repetition ending with the lyrics that were perfectly fitting for the ceremony:
And I’m proud to be an American where at least I know I’m free.
And I won’t forget the men who died, who gave that right to me.
And I’d gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today
‘Cause there ain’t no doubt I love this land
God bless the USA
Reverend Phillip Greene gave the ceremony’s benediction and the Retrieving of Colors was conducted by the Avery High JROTC (Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps) Instructor, Major Randy Matney.
“Every Memorial Day ceremony the county has held has been special and this year’s truly was one of the best ever,” declared Holden. “After heavy rain much of last weekend, thankfully it held off during the ceremony and the crowd attending was very enthusiastic as we honored those who paid the ultimate price for our freedom. And on behalf of everyone who helps organize this event each year, we’re honored to do so and we thank everyone who has attended any or all our ceremonies.”
The VFW Post 4286 Honor Guard includes: Captain Bill Dean, Sergeant, US Army, Retired; Honor Guard Chaplain Larry Dale Stamey, US Army; Lieutenant Colonel Bo Barinowski, US Army, Retired; Major Randy Matney, US Army, Retired; Sergeant Major Danny Barnett , US Army, Retired; Captain Dean Harris, US Navy Retired; Chris Bertolini, US Marine Corps; Captain Eric Bechard, US Army, Retired; Will Christianson, US Marine Corps; Troy Clark, US Army; Brook Dean, US Army; Jesse Downing, US Army Retired; Mitchell Durham, US Army; Kevin Holden, US Army, Retired; Jim Love, US Marine Corps; John Millan, US Army, Retired and US Marine Corps; Oliver Nyberg, US Air Force; Jeff Pollard, US Army; Chad Yang, US Army; Sergeant Major Anthony Pollygus, US Army, Retired; and Sergeant, Zeb White, US Marine Corps, Retired.
Honor Guard Emeritus members include: Sam Ray, Colonel, US Air Force; Jack Trivett, Corporal, US Army; Wayne Holden, Specialist, US Army; and Bob Mason, Specialist, US Army.
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