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Veterans Day 2007 · the renaming at organizational size
The act: On Veterans Day 2007 — Sunday, 11 November — American Legion Post 161 rededicated itself in the name of Technical Sergeant Ryan A. Balmer of Mishawaka, the Air Force special agent killed near Kirkuk, Iraq, on 5 June 2007, five months before. The House of Representatives' tribute in the Congressional Record of 13 November 2007 records it in the town's own sequence: "American Legion Post 161 in Mishawaka just this past Sunday rededicated itself on Veterans Day as Ryan A. Balmer Post 161." Balmer's service, death, and homecoming stand whole in the Wars record; this entry carries only the post's act and its reasoning.
The reasoning, in the post's words: The Tribune's account of the renaming ceremony preserves the post's deliberation, which is the organizational heart of the matter. The post had carried no man's name for eighty-eight years. "This post was founded in 1919 and we have many, many names," its spokesman said — the town's dead of four wars were all, in that sense, candidates — "But because the war in Iraq is a new kind of war and [Ryan A. Balmer] was the first to die (from Mishawaka) in that war, then it shall be called Ryan A. Balmer American Legion Post 161." The decision's logic is printed as the post stated it: not the town's only loss, and not a ranking of the dead, but the first name of a new war, given to the post by the generation then serving. The ceremony included a photo collage of Balmer assembled by Mishawaka's Nikki Burnett, who told the paper the hardest part "was picking the pictures."
The name in the weekly record: A post's name lives in its paper, and Post 161's does: the state alcohol-board filings carry the corporation as "Ryan A. Balmer Post 161 of the American Legion Inc," at 133 East Mishawaka Avenue, and the national locator lists the post under Balmer's name today. The post whose Grand Army predecessor took its captain's name in 1883 thus carries, since 2007, the name of the town's Iraq dead — the same act of naming, performed by two organizations a hundred and twenty-four years apart, each for its own war's dead. The parallel is the record's, printed once here.
Sources:
- Congressional Record, House, 13 November 2007, "Honoring Our Fallen Heroes" — the rededication, dated to Veterans Day.
- South Bend Tribune, "Legion renames post for Balmer" (2007), as indexed in the ProQuest newspaper record — the post's stated reasoning and the ceremony's collage.
- Indiana Alcohol and Tobacco Commission filings — the corporate name as carried in the post's present paper.
- Wars record of this history — Balmer's service record and the Senate tribute of 11 June 2007.