Late Elkhart Soldier, Family Honored At ZB Memorial Day Ceremony
By Leah Sander
InkFreeNews
WARSAW — A late Elkhart soldier and the family he left behind were honored at a special ceremony on Wednesday, May 25, in Warsaw.
The soldier was honored by Zimmer Biomet’s Veterans Resource Group through its annual Memorial Day wreath laying ceremony. It was held indoors at Center Lake Pavilion due to inclement weather.
Honored was late Army Spc. David A. Wilkey Jr. and his family. Wilkey was killed while serving in Iraq in 2007.
His widow, Melinda Wilkey and children Blayke Wilkey and Alexea Wilkey were present at Wednesday’s event.
The ceremony also featured a guest speaker, Army veteran and Medal of Honor recipient Allen J. Lynch.
Lynch noted that Memorial Day means different things to different people, and “for some of us, it is very, very personal.”
He said that a Gold Star mother he knows shared with him the story of being notified her son had been killed while serving in the military and the pain of going through life without him.
“She said, ‘Memorial Day is a day when I am forced to remember one of the worse days of my life and because I’m trying to build this lodge (for combat veterans) I do a lot of public speaking and every time I speak I have to take that part of me that wants to scream and cry and put that away, so I can talk about the bigger picture of what I want to do to honor his name,'” said Lynch.
“That’s Memorial Day for a lot of people,” he said. “For some of us who are veterans, it’s remembering that patrol, that last mission.”
He said several military members who were killed come to his thoughts, including one “who tried to rescue me and the guys I was with” when he was serving in the Army.
“So Memorial Day is very personal for many of us,” Lynch said.
“The one thing that we need to understand is none of us went into the military to sacrifice our lives,” he added. “We went in to sacrifice our time, the best time of our life. When a lot of people are building their careers, we chose to go into the military to serve our country, to sacrifice our time, our effort, our energy, but we did not go in to sacrifice our life, and I think it’s important because I think when we say ‘They sacrificed their lives’ we’re kind of pushing the responsibility to the men and women who have lost their lives in service to our country.”
“See, the responsibility of the ones who are doing the sacrificing is not them. They want to come home,” explained Lynch. “The government does the sacrificing. And because our government is elected by ‘We the People,’ we do the sacrificing. You and I. It is our responsibility; nobody else’s.”
Lynch then stated that Americans should choose government leaders who will go to war for only the right reasons and “who actually care about the American people and the American serviceman and woman.”
“A lot of people talk about serving veterans,” he said. “If you want to serve veterans, if you want to serve those in the military, our first responders, we need to elect to office those men and women who will have the best interests of the United States of America at heart and those who serve her and then we have to follow up on that by making sure when they come home from the war, that they are taken care of properly by the Department of Veteran Affairs and by our local communities.”
Zimmer Biomet representatives then presented Lynch with a check for $2,000 from the Zimmer Biomet Foundation in honor of Wilkey Jr. The funds are for Lynch’s Allen J. Lynch Medal of Honor Veterans Foundation.