Salt Lake Community College To Honor U.S. Soldiers on Veterans Day

Salt Lake Community College Honors U.S. Veterans, One of 145 Schools Participating Nationwide in Remembrance Day Roll Call

Salt Lake Community College has joined a nationwide effort to honor American service men and women who have provided military service in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past decade. On Veterans Day, Friday, November 11, campus and community volunteers at more than 145 college and universities across the nation will read the names of the 6,200-plus casualties of Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and Operation New Dawn.

Conducted by West High School Navy JROTC Cadets, flag raising ceremonies will take place concurrently at 8:00 a.m. on November 11 at the flagpoles of the Taylorsville Redwood Student Center, South City Campus and Jordan Campus. 8:30 a.m. Roll Call will begin in the Student Event Center at the College’s Taylorsville Redwood Campus.

Each institution participating in the Remembrance Day National Roll Call will organize its own reading of names and will observe at Noon MST a simultaneous nationwide minute of silence.  Currently more than 145 schools in 50 states and the District of Colombia have agreed to participate in the event.

SLCC will have 35 volunteer readers, each of whom will read 180 or more names. Utah Army National Guard Chaplain Gene Whitmore will be one of the readers. “I’m involved with this event because I want to pay tribute to the men and women who have fallen,” Chaplain Whitmore said. “I also want to do what I can help to the general population understand how important the sacrifices are that soldiers—both those who live and who die—and their families are in defending this country’s freedom and our way of life.”

Lt. Col. (Ret) Brett Morris, the National Roll Call coordinator, said, “We wanted to rally campus communities across the nation to send a powerful message to the troops currently serving that their peers have not forgotten their sacrifices or those of the fallen.”

“The reading of individual names is very poignant because it emphasizes the significance of each and every life lost,” said Morris, a retired Army officer and the associate director for Veterans Affairs at Eastern Kentucky University.  “Like the names inscribed at the new 9-11 Memorial in New York, each of the fallen deserves to be remembered for their sacrifice. There is no effort to raise money or promote individual programs. The event is simply to honor those who have sacrificed so much on our behalf.”

The Remembrance Day National Roll Call is sponsored by the Veterans Knowledge Community of NASPA Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. NASPA is a 12,000-member association for the advancement, health, and sustainability of student affairs professionals. The Veterans Knowledge Community (VKC) mission is to advocate for best practices to help student Veterans transition to college and succeed. As the National Roll Call sponsor, the goal of VKC was to have at least one institution in each of the 50 states participate in the event.

For information about the Salt Lake Community College Roll Call events contact Darlene Head, at 801-957-3833 or email at Darlene.head@slcc.edu.   

For more information about the National Roll Call effort, contact Brett Morris at remembrancerollcall@gmail.com. 

Visit va.eku.edu/rollcall for a complete list of participating schools.