ROTC cadets and midshipmen will assemble in dress uniforms at 11 a.m. Nov. 11 for the annual Veteran’s Day ceremony at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
ROTC cadets and midshipmen will assemble in dress uniforms at 11 a.m. Nov. 11 for the annual Veteran’s Day ceremony at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The free public ceremony will be outdoors at the Carolina Alumni Memorial in Memory of Those Lost in Military Service, located on Cameron Avenue between Phillips (120 E. Cameron) and Memorial halls. The rain site will be the Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building at 325 Pittsboro St.
Members of the University and local communities, including veterans, are invited to attend. Limited parking is available in town pay lots off Rosemary Street. Attendees are invited to a reception after the ceremony.
A color guard representing all three UNC ROTC programs – Army, Air Force and Naval/Marine – will assemble at 10:40 a.m. before presenting the colors. Veterans will be asked to stand and be recognized as the conflict in which they served is named.
This year’s speaker will be retired Col. Bill Causey, a Greensboro native who graduated from Carolina in 1968. He later earned two master’s degrees, in business from Chapman University and in national security and strategic studies from the Naval War College. He also completed the advanced management program in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
Causey enlisted in the Army in 1969 and was a distinguished military graduate from Engineer Officer Candidate School the next year. He then served with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam. Causey also has been parachute officer for the 82d Airborne Division and commander of the fifth Carolina Brigade, First Region, U.S. Army ROTC Cadet Command, responsible for Army ROTC activities in North and South Carolina.
His awards and decorations include the Legion of Merit, Bronze Star Medal, Meritorious Service Medal, Army Commendation Medal, Army Achievement Medal, Military Outstanding Volunteer Service Medal, Army General Staff Identification Badge and Master Parachutist Badge.
Upon its dedication in 2007, the memorial at UNC honored University alumni killed during wartime from the Civil War to the Gulf War. It was designed to allow addition of names not discovered in research for creating the memorial, as well as those lost later.
On May 11, 2009, Navy Cmdr. Charles Keith Springle, who graduated in 1979, was killed in Baghdad, becoming the first Carolina alumnus to die in the Iraq war. On Aug. 18, 2009, Army paratrooper Morris L. Walker, a Carolina Covenant Scholar who attended from 2004 through 2008, was killed in the war in Afghanistan, becoming UNC's first alumnus to die in that war.
A list of Carolina alumni lost in war, with biographical sketches, is on the General Alumni Association website at http://snipurl.com/1e8pwx.
Army ROTC – the Tar Heel Battalion – will sponsor this year’s ceremony, organized by 24-year veteran Master Sgt. Larry Thomas of Durham. Additional sponsors will be the UNC College of Arts and Sciences and its curriculum in peace, war and defense.
Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, falls on Nov. 11, the anniversary of the armistice signing by the Allies and the Germans in 1918 that ended World War I. For more information about the UNC ceremony, call the Army military science department in the College of Arts and Sciences at (919) 962-5546.
Army ROTC Web site: http://armyrotc.unc.edu/
Photo: ROTC students present the colors the 2007 UNC Veterans Day ceremony:
http://snipurl.com/1e8wjw
Army military science department contact: Lt. Col. Monte Yoder, mlyoder@email.unc.edu
News Services contact: LJ Toler, (919) 962-8589