Celebs at the LC

BY Marc Leepson

The Leadership & Education Conference’s main event is the two full and two half days of seminars that cover the gamut of veterans’ advocacy issues. But attendees also have the opportunity to meet and great special guests, including this year’s Excellence in the Arts and in the Sciences winners.

Headlining the bill—as he often does—will be the one and only Wayne Newton. The legendary entertainer will receive the President’s Award for Excellence in the Arts at the Saturday night Awards Banquet. That award honors “Mr. Las Vegas” for his decades-long support of American active-duty troops and veterans, as well as his long, illustrious show biz career.

Wayne Newton went to Vietnam with the USO the first time in 1966 when he was sixteen years old. He returned to the war zone again in 1968, and has entertained American troops in every military conflict since then, including those in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

Talk about a commitment to America’s veterans: Since that first trip to Vietnam, when he promised an American nurse that he’d call her mother when he returned home, Newton has made some 50,000 phone calls to deployed service members’ families back home. That even included proposing to a girlfriend for a soldier deployed in Iraq.

Joining Wayne Newton at the banquet will be John Olson, one of the most accomplished photographers who covered the Vietnam War. Olson will receive the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award. He was drafted into the Army when he was nineteen and working as a UPI technician. When he arrived in Vietnam in mid-1967 Olson was assigned to a signal battalion. Nine months later John Olson extended his tour and began working for Stars & Stripes as a photographer. 

During the Tet Offensive in February 1968, he spent three days photographing some of the fiercest fighting during the Battle for Hue. His memorable image of wounded Marines being evacuated on a tank was published in Life magazine and around the world, and he won the prestigious Robert Capa Award for “superlative photography requiring courage and enterprise abroad.” 

After he came home, Olson went to work at Life. At twenty-one, he became its youngest staff photographer. He soon returned to Vietnam and spent two years there shooting the war, then went on to cover the White House from 1969-70. He started his own company in 1972 to shoot advertising campaigns for some of the world’s top corporations. In 1994, he and his wife co-founded a company that produces high-end scanning and printing services. 

“The Marines and Tet: The Battle that Changed the Vietnam War,” an exhibition that featured twenty of John Olson’s Tet ’68 photographs, opened in January this year at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. An article on his Vietnam War experiences appeared in the March/April 2010 issue of The VVA Veteran (See http://archive.vva.org/archive/TheVeteran/0410/olson.html)

Troy Evans—the veteran character actor best known for his recurring roles in the TV series China Beach (as Motor Pool Sgt. Pepper) and ER (as the hospital clerk Frank Martin), and in the movies Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, Article 99, Under Siege, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Dahlia, and Demolition Man—will emcee the Saturday Night Awards banquet.

Evans, a native of Kalispell, Montana, was drafted into the Army and served a sixteen-month tour of duty with the 25th Infantry Division in Vietnam in 1968-69. He came home to Kalispell in the summer of 1969, opened up a rock ’n’ roll bar called The Powder Keg, and then made his way to Hollywood in the early eighties. Since then, he has appeared in more than fifty movies and some four hundred TV episodes.

VVA honored Troy Evans with the VVA Excellence in the Arts Award at the 2003 National Convention in St. Louis, and he hosted the Awards Ceremonies at the 2005 Convention in Reno.

Rick Francona, a retired U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, a veteran of the Vietnam War, and a renowned on-air TV Middle East analyst, will deliver the Keynote Address at the Opening Ceremonies on Wednesday morning, July 25.

Col. Francona is a fluent Arabic speaker who served most of his 27-year military intelligence career in the Middle East. He has worked with the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency dealing with crises in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Gulf. He served as DoD liaison to Iraqi military intelligence during the Iran-Iraq war; as an advisor and interpreter with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the Persian Gulf War; and as Defense Attaché in the UAE, and as Air Force Attaché in Syria.

A former Middle East analyst for NBC News, Col. Francona has provided on-air military analysis to CNN since 2013. His books include Ally to Adversary: An Eyewitness Account of Iraq’s Fall from Grace and Chasing Demons: My Hunt for War Criminals in Bosnia.

Dr. Peter A. Singer, a Professor of Clinical Medicine, the Chief of Clinical Endocrinology, and the Director of the Thyroid Diagnostic Center at USC’s Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles, will receive the Excellence in the Sciences Award at the Saturday night banquet.

Dr. Singer received his medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, and then joined the U.S. Navy. He served as a Navy medical doctor in Da Nang and San Francisco. While in Vietnam, Dr. Singer began what has become a lifetime work of serving those living in poverty in Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia. For nearly thirty years, he has returned to Vietnam to do humanitarian work as chair (and now chair emeritus) of East Meets West/Thrive Networks.

East Meets West/Thrive is an NGO founded by Le Ly Hayslip, whose autobiography was the basis of the Oliver Stone film, Heaven and Earth. The organization works throughout Asia, including Vietnam, to “improve the health and well-being of underserved communities,” specializing in “programs in the areas of water, sanitation and hygiene; and education.” During the last thirty years, the group has helped more than one million people living in poverty.