AVC Launches New Website

On behalf of the American Veterans Center, welcome to our new home on the web!?

It has been an extremely busy year for the AVC. Most notably, the center just recently organized the eighth annual National Memorial Day Parade presented by Boeing in Washington, DC. The parade was founded in 2005 in order to call attention to the true meaning of the holiday, and to bring the tradition of a Memorial Day parade back to our nation’s capital following a period of many decades in which Washington was without a parade on our armed forces’ most sacred day.

The parade proved a tremendous success, with more than 250,000 spectators on site and hundreds of thousands more watching the nationally syndicated television broadcast, as well as the broadcast around the world on The Pentagon Channel. Serving as Grand Marshal was aviation legend General Chuck Yeager, who was joined by honorary celebrity marshals Gary Sinise, Joe Mantegna, and Miss America, as well as famed Apollo 11 astronaut and Korean War veteran Buzz Aldrin. The parade also featured the U.S. Air Force Band, nearly 1,000 active duty military personnel, and musical performances by recording artists Kris Allen, G. Love, and Angie Johnson.

Outside of the parade, the American Veterans Center remains active in its core mission of preserving the legacy and honoring the sacrifice of our military men and women, of every generation. We have been continuing our oral history preservation project, collecting histories from veterans from World War II all the way to Afghanistan and Iraq for video profiles as well as for our Veterans Chronicles radio series. Most notably, we have been working with the Department of Defense to collect histories of Korean War veterans as part of their initiative to honor veterans on the 60th anniversary of the war.

Planning is also now underway for the American Veterans Center’s 15th Annual Conference, to be held in Washington, DC from October 25-27. The conference is our nation’s premier gathering of heroes, where they share their experiences with an audience of hundreds of JROTC and ROTC students as well as West Point and Air Force Academy cadets and Naval Academy midshipmen. This year’s conference will again feature veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam all the way through to young heroes from today’s military. Registration is open to the public, and we hope that you will be able to join us for a weekend none who attend will soon forget.

We welcome your support as we continue our mission, as well as your feedback on how we can better complete it. I hope you enjoy our new website, and please come back regularly!