When former prisoner of war Neil Black first visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C., he was overcome with anxiety and he turned back.
It was shortly after the 1982 dedication of the black granite wall, which lists the names of the more than 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam, and about a decade after Black’s release from what the POWs had named the Hanoi Hilton.
“I got teary eyed,” said Black, 80, of Carlsbad, California. “I don’t normally do that but I couldn’t help myself.”
In April, 50 years after the fall of Saigon, Black returned on a formal trip celebrating veterans. By then he had been to the memorial several times, but this trip stood out for the spirituality he felt, for the camaraderie among the veterans and the cheers from onlookers.
He was able to place his hand over the name of a friend, William Pitsenbarger, killed while helping to rescue soldiers wounded during a firefight in Vietnam, and to say a prayer.
Black’s weekend stay in the country’s capital was made possible by Honor Flight San Diego, a nonprofit organization that flies veterans to Washington, D.C., to visit the military and other memorials. To date, more than 2,000 veterans have participated through the organization, part of the nationwide Honor Flight Network.
Honor Flight San Diego is one of 69 nonprofit organizations that are being recognized by NBCUniversal Local this year with Local Impact Grants.
The grants, announced on Tuesday and which total $2.5 million, were given to organizations operating in the markets of the 11 NBC- and Telemundo-owned stations and will support programs are as varied as the honor flights, activities with farm animals for children with disabilities and a project to end gun violence in Washington, D.C.
The goal is to reach smaller, grass-roots groups that know what their neighbors need, said Jessica Clancy, NBCUniversal’s senior vice president of corporate social responsibility. To be eligible, the nonprofits must have an operating budget of between $100,000 and $1 million.
“It really goes to our focus on supporting organizations that are deeply connected to their community,” she said.
Many are sustained by their volunteers, from the guardians who accompany the veterans to Washington, D.C., to the more than 350 people who help to operate The Barn at Spring Brook Farm, a Pennsylvania program for children with special needs.
“People want to make sure that other folks are taken care of,” Clancy said.
NBCUniversal has awarded $21 million in unrestricted funding to 615 nonprofit organizations across the country since 2018. The focus is on youth education and empowerment, next generation storytellers and community engagement.
“Local nonprofits are essential to our communities, and provide so many of the meaningful services and support that would otherwise be unavailable to our friends, neighbors and loved ones,” Valari Staab, the chairman of NBCUniversal Local, said in a statement.
‘A fairy tale’
The Barn at Spring Brook Farm, on 14 acres in Chester County, opened originally as a place for local children to meet farm animals, then in 2008 added a summer camp and now extends activities into the school year, including hosting field trips. (There is no programming in the winter because it is too cold.)
The founder, Mary Beth Drobish, believed children with disabilities could benefit from interacting with the farm animals, which number 18, among them miniature horses and donkeys, a rabbit, goats, sheep, a pot-bellied pig and a cat.
“It actually is kind of a fairy tale,” said the executive director, Jeanette Corgnati.
The summer camp, Camp Geronimo, named after Drobish’s horse, remains its flagship program. It operates for six weeks, a week at a time, for up to 16 children, many of whom have autism spectrum disorder or Down syndrome, cerebral palsy or similar disabilities.
The children take hay rides, walk the animals, bottle-feed a calf that visits from a dairy down the road and pick tomatoes and lettuce in a vegetable garden that older teens have helped to plant. Some of the children who participated in the programs, 477 in 2024, come from Philadelphia and have never been on a farm, Corgnati said.
“Their faces light up quite a bit when they start to feed the animals,” she said.
The counselor who was paired with Carolina Colarusso’s 6-year-old daughter, Natalie, watched the girl’s favorite shows — “Descendants” on Disney Channel and old episodes of “Teen Titans,” the animated superhero television series — so that she would know the characters and songs that Natalie likes. Natalie has trouble with speech, her mother said, but the counselor understood her.
“She’s still asking if she can go back to camp,” Carolina Colarusso said.
Violence prevention and trauma support
The T.R.I.G.G.E.R. Project confronts gun violence as a public health crisis, which is how it was classified in 2024 by the then-U.S. surgeon general.
There were more than 48,000 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2022, according to the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, with homicide rates the highest among teenagers and young adults ages 15 to 34 years and among African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans.
T.R.I.G.G.E.R., an acronym for the “True Reasons I Grabbed the Gun Evolved from Risks,” is Washington D.C. based and works to end gun violence by providing a safe space — both physically and emotionally — for young survivors and by tackling the everyday gun violence that affects Black people living in cities. Politicians should be spurred to take action by more than mass shootings and terrorist attacks, the group says.
Tia Bell founded The T.R.I.G.G.E.R. Project because she knows first-hand the destruction gun violence brings. Her mother was shot and survived. Her uncle was killed when she was a teenager. She was a star basketball player, the first in her family to finish high school and to be heading to college, and his death left her devastated.
“I went through all of the grief stages,” she said. “So I went through depression. I went through anger.”
Bell, who went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in sport management from North Carolina State University, modeled The T.R.I.G.G.E.R. Project on what she would have needed then.
A six-week summer program offers job opportunities and introduces participants to violence prevention and trauma support. They learn to see control as a character strength and how to use meditation and breathing to de-escalate tense situations and they know they can reach out to Bell for an Uber to get out of a violent situation.
“It’s the systemic violence, it’s the structural violence, that happens, that allows for this disease to spread, and so they’re going out into their community with this knowledge,” Bell said.
For 18-year-old Faith Johnson from Southeast, D.C., who now attends Towson University in Maryland, T.R.I.G.G.E.R. has helped her better understand the reasons for gun violence and not be as angry as she was. She feels calmer and more peaceful around her peers or those older than she.
“I don’t have to be in survival mode when I’m around these people,” she said. “You can find a sense of calm and peace in others and they can find it in you.”
“Everywhere I go, I talk about the program all the time,” she said.
Ny’Lah Newkirk, a 19-year-old student at Coppin State University, a historically Black university in Baltimore, said T.R.I.G.G.E.R. was like a second home.
“It helps me cope with things,” she said.
Confronting hidden guilt and sadness
Another Vietnam War veteran, Sheldon Margolis, had already flown to Washington, D.C., as an Honor Flight guardian in April 2023. From the records kept at the memorial, he was able to find the last name of a man who had been killed next to him, Nicholas Pyle of Columbus, Ohio, and to get a rubbing of his name.
Margolis, 81, saw no need to go again as a veteran but was persuaded to by Holly Shaffner, the group’s vice chairman. He agreed if his active-duty son, Scott, could be his guardian, and two men went in November 2023.
“I opened up about things I had never talked about,” Margolis said. “It was just an amazing reconciliation. I finally acknowledged the guilt and the sadness that I had for the loss of lives of people that worked for me and with me. I was finally able to talk about it and to make sense out of it and to bring it out in the open.”
Margolis, who received the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, was the executive officer for a river patrol division, stationed on the Mekong Delta, northwest of Saigon on the Cambodian border. When they were attacked by rockets under a bridge, the falling pieces killed Pyle. Margolis’s left foot was crushed, he had shrapnel in his back, and he was sent home and on to a career in the U.S. Navy. But the sadness he felt remained with him and hidden.
“I never admitted to anyone, not even myself,” he said.
Neil Black, who served as a pararescueman, responsible for rescuing downed military personnel, was taken prisoner in 1965 when his helicopter was shot down over North Vietnam.
He was held for seven and half years in the Hoa Lo prison, where he survived torture, solitary confinement and illness. He prayed, studied and sometimes stared at a wall and imagined the house he would someday build — his family owned a building supply company. When he was released, he weighed 110 pounds and his mother hugged the wrong man at Andrews Air Force Base because she did not recognize him.
He shared the distinction of the longest-held enlisted American prisoner of war in history, according to the citation for the Air Force Cross that he was awarded. He also received the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.
Black became a pilot in the Air Force, and after studying Russian, served as the air operations officer with the U.S. Military Liaison Mission to the Soviet forces in East Germany until he retired in 1987. He met his fellow prisoner, the late Sen. John McCain, and worked on McCain’s unsuccessful runs for president. And he built his house, in Pennsylvania, before moving to California.
The women on the flights, and Shaffner is a veteran who spent 24 years in the U.S. Coast Guard, add the Military Women’s Memorial to their itinerary.
But the trips are about much more than visiting memorials, said Shaffner and the chairman and flight director, Julie Brightwell. For some, like Margolis, it is a chance to confront their experiences during their time in service. For many, the return to San Diego, when the airport fills with up to 1,500 people and the colors of the American flag, is homecoming they did not get.
“Everybody cries,” Brightwell said.
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