Each spring, thousands of American flags are placed on grave sites of veterans at cemeteries throughout the Upper Valley, from the Revolutionary War to more modern conflicts in the Middle East.

In some communities, town employees place the flags; in other communities, volunteers take on the honor. Often veterans themselves, the volunteers are connected to organizations including the American Legion. Some are assisted by young people in scouts or other youth-based groups.

In honor of Memorial Day, here are the stories of three volunteers and their continuing mission to make sure veterans — and their service, whether it be in war or peacetime — are never forgotten.

‘Each one’s got a story’

Each year across seven different cemeteries in Lebanon, volunteers place about 1,700 flags at veterans’ grave sites. The majority of the labor is done by members of American Legion Post 22.

Bob Pushee and his wife, Germaine, who is a member of the legion’s auxiliary, have taken part in the annual rite for around 15 years.

On a blustery evening the week before Memorial Day, Pushee walked around the Glenwood and Mount Calvary cemeteries with a bundle of small American flags in his hand. His gaze was focused downward, keeping a careful eye out for markers or engravings that identified occupants as veterans.

“If we didn’t do it, no one would do it,” he said. “And I think it’s very important to do it.”

As he looks at the flags, Pushee thinks of all the service members as well as all the lives connected to them.

“I think that somebody’s recognizing them every year and that’s very important and each one’s got a story,” Pushee said. “Each person’s got a story and I’m part of that story.”

Pushee, who grew up in Lyme, served as a combat engineer in the Army from 1966 to 1969, spending the majority of his time in Germany. He was 19 when he enlisted.

Pushee’s father was a veteran. His brother was serving in the Army, and so was a childhood friend.

“With the war going on, I figured I’d go to Vietnam,” he said.

He was on an assignment in France when he got his orders.

“I was up on a building and they said, ‘Pushee, you just got orders for Vietnam’,” Pushee recalled. “I didn’t have too good a feeling.” 

Since his brother had volunteered to go, Pushee said his orders were called back and he didn’t have to go.

Later, Pushee’s son served in Desert Storm, continuing a family tradition of miliary service.

Pushee is quick to remind people that while veterans may have been in the ones deployed, their families were affected as well.

For his part, he missed his son’s birth and didn’t meet him until he was 11 months old. After a 30-day leave, Pushee returned to the Army and another 14 months went by before he was reunited with his wife and son.

“You got to remember the wives when the husband is gone for two years without seeing him,” Pushee said. “You can’t just think of the veterans, you’ve got to think of the people who were left behind.”

Teaching history

Each spring, Dennis Backus visits cemeteries in Hartford to check in on the veterans who are laid to rest there.

Backus leads the Hartford Veterans Council and has placed flags in cemeteries for about 40 years, making him the town’s longest-serving volunteer to take on the task. Each year, roughly 1,250 veterans get a new American flag placed on a post in front of their graves.

Backus served in artillery unit in the Army in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.

“I had a lot of friends and some relatives that didn’t make it back,” Backus, now 77, said in an interview while sitting in the back of his pickup truck at Quechee Hilltop Cemetery earlier this month.

He was living in Waitsfield, Vt., and working at a ski resort when his draft notice showed up.

Friends from school had already been sent overseas and he figured it was a matter of time before it would be his turn.

“I knew before I even got drafted that I’d end up in Vietnam,” Backus said. “I just knew it.”

As soon as he returned from basic training, Backus said his father signed him up to be an American Legion member. Ever since then, he’s been part of multiple veterans organizations. He appreciates the camaraderie

“You’ve got people to talk to that were in the same position you were in,” Backus said.

He views the flags as part of a lifelong commitment to honor those who served, whether they died in combat or later on.

Since taking over leadership of the council in the mid-1990s, he’s worked to involve school groups.

He said that it’s valuable for students to go beyond what they’re taught in school about the United States’ conflicts and learn about the veterans from their own community.

“I don’t think that the kids know enough about the history of what the veterans go through,” he said. “The only way that it’s going to (...) get across to them is if we do stuff like this and get them involved in it.”

Over the years, health effects from his service have showed up, and he qualifies as a disabled veteran. He has hearing loss from firing artillery and in later years developed diabetes after being exposed to Agent Orange.

All things considered, he thinks of himself as lucky.

He’s made it a priority to help other veterans apply for disability benefits, including newer veterans who can qualify for benefits under the PACT Act after being exposed to toxic chemicals from burn pits in the Middle East. The PACT Act also expanded benefits for veterans exposed to Agent Orange in the Vietnam Era.

“We don’t want them to have to go through and fight the way that we had to and not get it until 50 years after,” Backus said of veterans of the Gulf Wars.

After Veterans Day in November, Backus and a group of volunteers will return to Hartford’s cemeteries to remove the flags from the gravestones and save them for a flag retirement ceremony the following spring. During flag retirements, a color guard conducts a ceremony honoring the flags before they are burned. It’s a ritual he plans on continuing in all the years to come.

‘What we do to help’

As a teenager in Thetford in the late 1960s, Nathan Pero watched the Channel 3 evening news every night. CBS anchor Walter Cronkite and correspondent Dan Rather would discuss the Vietnam War.

“Body count, body count, body count,” Pero, now 75, recalled hearing. “Dad said, ‘You’re going to go. Just wait until you get drafted and go have some fun.’ ”

Pero’s father was a World War II veteran who had a steel plate in his skull after the vehicle he was driving was hit by an artillery shell.

“He was one of the ones who came home,” Pero said in a telephone interview. “Many of them didn’t.”

At 19, while working in construction, Pero was drafted. Instead of signing on for a two-year tour in the Army — and an almost certain ticket to Vietnam — he took his father’s advice and joined the Air Force for eight years where he worked as a fire truck mechanic.

After spending most of 1969 to 1975 in Germany and Thailand, Pero returned to Thetford.

His father, a member of American Legion Post 79 in town, told Pero he would be joining. “ ‘This is what we do to help veterans in the community’,” Pero recalled his father saying.

In the decades since, Pero has carried on the tradition of placing flags at veterans’ grave sites throughout Thetford. He and other members of the American Legion place about 900 flags spread across five main cemeteries and six sites that Pero refers to as “satellite” cemeteries where there aren’t as many veterans buried.

In the last five years, his grandson, now 11, has accompanied him on those outings.

“Underneath every one of those flags there is somebody who did their duty,” Pero said. “ ... Everybody who goes through war who comes back is hurt either mentally or physically. It changes you.”

Pero has a service-connected skin disease from his time in the Air Force. He is a member of the Disabled Veterans of America and works to connect other veterans with services. There are veterans who are honored in Thetford that died in combat, but there are so many others who carried those conflicts with them for the rest of their lives. Pero thinks about that as he visits cemeteries.

“I always stop at each stone, look at that person’s name,” Pero said.

He thinks about the lives they lived and they contributed to their communities. For those who died in battle, he contemplates what they might have accomplished if their lives hadn’t been cut short.

Then he places a flag and moves onto the next stone: “I hope somebody will pick it up after I’m gone.”

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.