Letters home from Vietnam saved to be shared

Meagan Mills: Resident shares family wartime letters
By Meagan Mills
October 2, 2012

Many teenagers today check in with their parents and keep in touch with friends through instantaneous forms of communication such as text messages and Skype, while others remember growing up in the era during wartime where preserving a bond with a loved one meant relying on written letters that could take weeks to arrive to their intended destinations.

Meg Amsden Folsom, 45-year resident of Winter Park, remembers sharing her active teen years with her father, Robert S. Amsden, through letters and tapes while he served as field director for the American Red Cross in the Vietnam War.

“It was total turmoil,” said Meg, who was writing letters to her father from 1968 to 1970. “It was a controversial war to begin with and tensions were high. Some of my classmates had boyfriends and brothers who were serving, since typically they draft or enlist younger ages, but no one in our community had a father involved with the war.”

Her father retired from the U.S. Air Force as a senior master sergeant in 1967 and joined the American Red Cross, training at Fort Bragg, N.C. before being assigned to a base in Cu Chui, Vietnam. Her mother, Nancy Amsden, was responsible for running a single-family home with Meg, 15, her sister Lane Amsden Lewis, 17 and her brother Bobby Amsden, 13, which was not always easy.
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Secret Service Grabs Florida Man in Obama Threat

Secret Service Grabs Florida Man in Obama Threat
Aug 3, 2012
The U.S. Secret Service is investigating a mentally unstable Florida man who made multiple verbal threats against President Obama and former president Bill Clinton, both of whom were visiting the state at the time, law enforcement officials tell ABC News. Federal agents and deputies from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office descended on the suspect’s apartment complex Thursday, four miles from where Obama was holding a campaign rally at Rollins College in Winter Park.

The threat, called into a Veterans Affairs office earlier in the day, was deemed sufficiently legitimate to warrant a swift response, particularly since Obama had not yet left the area, officials said. But he did not attempt to attend the event or get close to Obama and Clinton.
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President Obama rallies at Rollins College

President Obama rallies at Rollins College
By Amanda Evans, Scott McDonnell and Kelli Cook, Team Coverage
News 13
Last Updated: Friday, August 03, 2012
WINTER PARK

President Barack Obama made good on his promise to come back to Central Florida for a campaign stop he had to cancel two weeks earlier.

Obama was supposed to speak at Rollins College on July 20, but after news broke about the deadly massacre at a Colorado movie theater, the president cancelled his campaign plans for the day and headed back to the White House.

The crowd sang "Happy Birthday" to the president as he opened his rally in Rollins College in Winter Park. His 51st birthday is Saturday.

The president also talked about the Olympic games, saying that "we come together when we have to present ourselves to the world."
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Memorial Day Service at Glen Haven Memorial Park, Winter Park FL

Memorial Day Service 2011 at Glen Haven Memorial Park, Winter Park FL

Bud Hedinger WFLA Master of Ceremony
Charles Haugubrooks, singer
Chaplain Dick Sauer





With history of how Memorial Day started by State Re-enactment Society

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863




Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.


Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.


We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.


But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.


It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Second Inaugural Address
March 4, 1865
Fellow-Countrymen:


At this second appearing to take the oath of the Presidential office there is less occasion for an extended address than there was at the first. Then a statement somewhat in detail of a course to be pursued seemed fitting and proper. Now, at the expiration of four years, during which public declarations have been constantly called forth on every point and phase of the great contest which still absorbs the attention and engrosses the energies of the nation, little that is new could be presented. The progress of our arms, upon which all else chiefly depends, is as well known to the public as to myself, and it is, I trust, reasonably satisfactory and encouraging to all. With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is ventured.


On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, urgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish, and the war came.


One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."


With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Living memorials honoring all wars, WWI, WWII, Korean, Vietnam, Desert Storm, Afghanistan and Iraq by Winter Springs High School AJROTC


Lance Cpl. Kyle Davis USMC, back from Afghanistan two weeks before Osama was killed.