Though they didn’t look like it, the San Benito County veteran and the Montana man were brothers. Not in the traditional sense of the word since Hollister resident Vince Luna was a self-described “little Mexican kid” and his friend, Mark Hinkle, hailed from the west and was blond and blue-eyed.
But they shared a brotherhood of sorts built over countless hours of table tennis games, the sad moment when Hinkle’s girlfriend penned him a “Dear John” letter and the shared experience of training for war.
“And I still know his birthday,” said Luna, now 73, as he stared up at his friend’s name on a replica of the Vietnam Memorial stationed in Hollister this week. “And the day he was shot and killed.”
Hinkle’s name is one of 58,299 memorialized on a glossy, black wall in Washington D.C. The wall spans 493 feet and honors the 2.7 million people who served in the U.S. military in Vietnam. This week, Luna visited that name on the 253-foot-long replica stationed in Hollister’s Dunne Park for the Independence Day weekend.
Hinkle never turned 21 and was killed just three months before he was supposed to come home, Luna said.
“In the service, you got a friend but you know (if) something happens, he’s got your back. It’s something special,” Luna said. “And that’s why it hurts sometimes because I think, ‘He didn’t make it.’”
About 60 people gathered at Dunne Park for the 1 p.m. Thursday ceremony and watch veterans raise the American flag, a symbolic start to the wall’s weekend stay in rural San Benito County during the Hollister Freedom Rally motorcycle event.
This visit marks the third time the memorial has been to Hollister, said Ray Friend, a veteran and city council member. The last visit was about 12 years at the site of the now-demolished Fremont School, he said. Later, the wall made a visit to the Sacred Heart Parish School in Hollister, the veteran said.
Longtime Hollister resident Chris Gonzalez, 65, also attended the ceremony to remember lost friends. His buddy, Steven Ramos, is among thousands of people commemorated in tiny, white letters on that glossy black wall. A Hollister resident of about 18 years, Gonzalez has attended most of the town’s biker rallies and was unsure how much he would participate in that this year, he said. It was the memorial that drew him out of his house Thursday afternoon.
“This is one place I would not miss,” the veteran said.
The memorial’s arrival in Hollister comes during the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the war, a conflict that still is present in the minds of many who lived through it.
Luna has been to the original memorial in Washington D.C. not once, but three times. The first visit was just before sunset, and the immense wall had a shadow, the veteran said. The experience was so emotional he almost didn’t approach it to search for his friend’s name.
“I stood away for a little while just looking at the memorial,” he said.
Thursday afternoon, the sun reflected off the glossy surface onto veterans’ faces searching thousands of tiny, white letters for familiar names.
“You got to respect this place because it’s veterans that gave their lives in order for us to celebrate the Fourth of July,” Luna said. “Some gave some and some gave all.”
Nearby, the flags of each branch of the military waved in the wind beside the red, white and blue of the American flag.
“I’m glad we’re doing this so people can remember,” he said.
