As the chairman of the board of our island veterans’ 501 (c)3 corporation, HIVM, Inc., I’m obligated to respond to comments made by Neal Herbert in his letter titled “Memorial Day politics” on West Hawaii Today’s opinion page.
Unfortunately, I was one of several of our board members who was unable to attend the Hilo Memorial Day ceremony sponsored by the VFW post that I belong to but I did get the video and a firsthand report afterward from our event organizer, and was also briefed by Harry Kim on Neal’s confrontation with him at the conclusion of the ceremony.
Harry is a longtime personal friend dating back to when I’d just moved here from Oahu in March 1984 to command the Army installations on Hawaii Island. We worked collaboratively then in preparing for an expected imminent lava inundation of Hilo from the eruptions on Mauna Loa, and I gained a tremendous respect for him for his competence, leadership, and total dedication to the welfare of the public. We stayed in touch in the years since, so I turned to then-Mayor Harry Kim for assistance and advice after I retired from a second career here in secondary education and became a member of the relatively new HIVM board of directors in 2004.
True to his reputation as a competent, responsive, and dependable person, he helped us obtain our three contiguous parcels of unplanned open public lands in 2005 that we’re now finally getting ready to begin construction on, and his administration was instrumental in assisting us getting our entitlements.
During the interim between when he left office in 2008 until he decided recently to seek election, Harry served as an ex- officio member of our board.
Therefore, it was a no-brainer that I asked him to represent us at the ceremony the day before when I learned an emergency precluded our intended representative to attend. There was nothing “political” about this nor was any thought given by any of us of a possible political advantage to be gained from it. Harry just did with magnanimity what he does every Memorial Day since long before I moved here: He honors our veterans at the veterans’ cemetery in Hilo because, unlike most elected officials, he’s motivated by principle — not politics — in everything he does and is indeed a true veteran who exemplifies what duty, honor, and country means to us.
Bob Williams, USMC, is a resident of Pepekeo