Florida II

I arrived in Perry (about two hours Northwest of Gainesville) after dark and in the ever continuing rain. I decided to take a look anyway as I was not certain that I would have time to come back. As it turned out, I did. So, some of these shots were taken at night in the rain and the others on a much better day. I am so glad that I did. Even at night the park was impressive. Quite small, but just full of monuments to the areas Vets. A number of wars are covered and there is even a place for a new memorial that is being worked on. One assumes that it will be to Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans.

The Vietnam memorial is polished black stone with a map of Southeast Asia on it. No names are listed here, but on brick walls throughout the park are listed names of Vets from all wars. There did not seem to be any particular order to the listings as you may see in the pictures. In addition, the Vietnam site had three plaques giving history and statistics from the war.

Another interesting thing that is happening is that more and more of these sites have a separate memorial to POW's. In my experience POW's seemed to be pretty much exclusive to Vietnam, but, these memorials have moved beyond that and include all. I recently read somewhere that more than 188,000 are still considered MIA from America's wars!