A salute to service: A collection of our recent stories about veterans

Drive by Walter Coy’s South Omaha house on a summer day, and you may catch the World War II Army veteran cutting the grass in his front yard.

Now 103 years old, he’s been on Earth for every Veterans Day since the first one (then called Armistice Day) to celebrate the end of World War I in 1918.

Marty Ramirez rarely had the nightmares or flashbacks of combat that have haunted many other Vietnam veterans.

In the more than 50 years since a rocket blast nearly killed him 10 days before his tour was to end, the Purple Heart recipient barely even discussed the war with his wife and their seven children.

This Veterans Day, odds are good you’ll find Vince Orduña puttering in the backyard of his modest Plattsmouth home.

If he’s not chopping away at a chunk of wood or sprinkling feed for the chickens, he’ll probably be kicking back in a lounge chair next to a bubbling koi pond he built himself, inside a screened patio, where his seven cats roam free.

In the waning days of World War II, Merchant Marine seaman Bob Wiegand served in the engine room of a ship convoying war supplies to American service members fighting Japan in the Far East.

He endured boot camp, wore a uniform and saluted officers like other members of the U.S. armed forces. He bore the risk of sudden attack by kamikaze aircraft or submarine-launched torpedoes.

During 24 years in Air Force medicine, Mary Smith, a retired Air Force nurse practitioner, had put in many long, hard days.

Never before, though, had one ended with crowds of sign-wielding strangers — and a few friends — cheering for her and for her 134 fellow Nebraska veterans, all of them women.

The Rev. Suzanne How wore a Marine Corps uniform for 27 years before she became a woman of the cloth.

In September, How — now the pastor of Immanuel State Line and Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Wymore, Nebraska — presided over the services for Cpl. Daegan Page, a Marine from Omaha who was killed when a terrorist bomb exploded near the airport gate in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Four years ago today, current and former service members, ROTC cadets and Bellevue residents gathered as the last surviving Tuskegee Airman in Nebraska, Robert D. Holts, 93, served as grand marshal in the Defenders of Freedom Veterans Day parade in Olde Towne Bellevue. 

Holts died in February of this year.