Jacobetti Veterans honored for service
Michigan is home to an estimated 650,000 veterans. Two hundred and four of those brave men and women reside at the D.J. Jacobetti Veterans Home in Marquette. Today, they were honored for their service.
NMU ROTC Cadets began the ceremony with the posting of the colors, followed by a round of speeches from state legislators praising the sacrifices made by what they consider our finest generation.
VFW officials expressed a similar admiration to the men and women in Lansing who have allocated more than a million dollars in funding for veteran assistance.
“Number one, those vets have to be taken care of, especially standing here today in the Jacobetti Center,” State Representative Scott Dianda of Calumet said. “Dominic Jacobetti understood these people need care long-term. We have to take care of them. If they need air conditioning because of a hot summer, they’ve got to have the proper things to take care of these folks.”
“It’s easy to help the veterans because of the sacrifice they’ve made for us, just easy to do that,” State Senator Tom Casperson of Escanaba said. “But it’s also setting priorities, and I think our veterans need to be a priority when you look at the service they’ve provided and the sacrifice they made. My son-in-law’s in the Navy; he’s been deployed since May. He’ll be back in a couple of weeks and we miss him, and I know the sacrifice. I’ve got a granddaughter that he and my daughter gave me, and I know he’s missed a lot of that.”
“We’ve got to honor the veterans,” Forgotten Eagles, Chapter 1 President Richard ‘Duke’ Mayo said. “Even if you don’t like the war, you need to honor the veterans, and we need to do something for them because without them, we don’t have our freedom. The people even today that are willing to go and do what they do, over and over again…when we were in Vietnam, we were pretty much guaranteed one year, and we were home and that was it. These veterans are going back over and over again and volunteering, and it makes me proud.”
The Forgotten Eagles donated two checks totaling $6,000 to the veterans home. Over the last ten years, they’ve contributed $134,000 to the Michigan Veterans Trust Fund.
If you’d like to help the cause, you can visit their website.