Chapter 787 and the Hillsborough County, Florida, Vietnam Veterans Memorial

BY MARC LEEPSON

The plan for Veterans Memorial Park and Museum in Tampa, Florida, which is located east of the city near the Florida State Fairgrounds, is to have a dozen memorials honoring those who fought in America’s wars, from the Seminole wars to the current war in Afghanistan. The first memorial, which was dedicated on Veterans Day 2011, honors the service of Vietnam veterans. The Hillsborough County Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the first in the county dedicated to local Vietnam veterans, was the brainchild of Bob Silmser, a member of Tampa Chapter 787.

Silmser, a U.S. Air Force veteran, joined the chapter in 2003. He soon became its representative on the Hillsborough County Veterans Council, which was considering redesigning Tampa’s Veterans Memorial Park. “When we talked about redesigning the park, we decided to have one memorial for each of the different wars,” Silmser said in a recent interview. “I became chair of the Vietnam theater of war memorial.”

That was in 2006. Silmser and Chapter 787 member Jim LaGarde spearheaded a five-year effort to come up with the memorial’s design and to raise the funds to build it. “The chapter got behind the idea,” Silmser said. “We had been putting money aside from our car show to bring the traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial back to Tampa. So we decided to put that toward the new memorial. Within ten months we raised $70,000. And Hillsborough County provided about $40,000.” The county also did the landscaping and other construction work for the memorial.

Silmser and Vietnam veteran Jim Basta came up with the original design for the striking memorial, which sits inside the park surrounded by sweeping live oaks and is visible from heavily traveled U.S. Route 301. Its main feature is a six-foot-tall, twelve-foot-wide polished granite Wall of Honor on which are inscribed the names of 115 Hillsborough County service personnel who perished in the Vietnam War.

The other side of the wall contains a mural of in-country scenes, including Air Force planes, Army helicopters, Navy ships, and Marine and Army troops on the ground. It is the work of artist Tim Lawn, an Iraq War veteran who works as an illustrator for the U.S. Special Operations Command at nearby MacDill Air Force Base.

“I did a series of sketches for Bob [Silmser] until we both became comfortable with the design,” Lawn said. “Once the design was done, a specialized company etched it in stone. This was the nerve-wracking part because taking a small drawing and blowing it up to fit on three four-feet-wide, six-feet-high panels is a very challenging problem. I was really pleased and relieved at the unveiling of the wall because I think we pulled it off.”

The other striking feature of the memorial is a pair of helicopters, a Huey and a Cobra, both of which flew in Vietnam. “Jim Basta, who was a helicopter pilot, got that done,” Silmser said. “He contacted the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, and they came up with the Huey and the Cobra.”

About seven hundred people, including many Vietnam veterans and family members of those whose names are etched on the memorial, attended the dedication on November 11. “It’s a great memorial,” Silmser said. “It’s a place of healing.”