MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. — Families gathered at Island Park in Mount Pleasant on Saturday to receive handmade plaques honoring their loved ones who served as prisoners of war or went missing in action.
The event was held at the Michigan Vietnam Memorial at Island Park, where five veterans were recognized for their service. Among them was Robert Warren Fletcher, who joined the Army at 17 years old and became a prisoner of war while serving in Korea after only a few months in the country.
His daughters, Kanda Fletcher and Elizabeth Schuchert, said their father's ankle was broken during a forced march to the POW camps.
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"They were captured, and had to march to the pow camps. My dad had somewhere along the line broken his ankle and I'd had ever taken that boot off, he would've been left on the side of the road dead," Fletcher and Schuchert said.
After three years, Robert was released when the war concluded and returned home.
"He was repatriated with the United States and came back to a pretty ungrateful nation," Fletcher and Schuchert said.
For his daughters, Saturday's recognition was long overdue.
"None of us will ever know what it was like, and we should never have to know," Fletcher and Schuchert said.
Doug Pickel, the event organizer who made the plaques, said many of the veterans being honored have waited decades for recognition.
"Some of them it's 80 years gone by that they've never been recognized as being a POW for that service to our country," Pickel said.
Pickel said a new POW/MIA memorial at Island Park will recognize hundreds of POW and MIA veterans from across Michigan for generations to come. The memorial is expected to break ground next spring and will feature life-sized bronze statues.
"It's just our way to recognize that sacrifice but also through the life sized bronze statues in the memorial to tell their stories for future generations so that nobody ever forgets," Pickel said.
For families like Robert's, the memorial will provide a permanent place to honor their loved ones.
"Freedoms not free and my dad always said if we don't go fight them over there, do you want them here? Fighting them here in our soil so he did not. He did not support war, he did not support it but he supported keeping this country free," Fletcher and Schuchert said.
