Brig. Guiseppe Coletta

As part of his Memorial Day weekend features, MilBlogger “Greyhawk” offers “Per Liberta,” a memoriam to Italian Brigadier Giuseppe Coletta. Coletta, a Sicilian officer in the 13th Regiment of the Carabinieri (military police) of Gorizia, was killed in a Nov. 12, 2003 bomb blast in an-Nasiriyah, Iraq. “Greyhawk” is an active duty 20-year veteran who served in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The Sovereign Council of the Order of Malta has posthumously conferred on Brigadier Giuseppe Coletta the Gold Medal of Merit with Swords. The decoration acknowledges the value of the Brigadier’s work to the Order’s assistance to the Iraqi population, in particular to the children and families who received essentials such as food, medicine and scholastic materials.

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Col. Austin Bay

Columnist and Operation Iraqi Freedom veteran Austin Bay recounts his Memorial Day weekend 2005 speech to Tejanos In Action:

“This morning I spoke at a Memorial Day ceremony held at the Travis County International Cemetery. A group of Hispanic vets tends the graves of indigent American veterans buried in the cemetery. The place is one of those plots of ground with a decidedly checkered past. In the 19th century it was a “paupers graveyard.” The county buried small pox victims at the site, and – according to one of the officers in Tejanos in Action – victims of a plague that struck in the early 20th century were buried there as well. I suspect the land served as “a Negro cemetery” and “a Mexican cemetery.”

Approximately twenty years ago Tejanos in Action started fixing up the cemetery and handling the burials of indigent veterans….”

His words to their gathering follow.

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