A Marion filmmaker’s labor of love about the traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial that drew crowds to Delaware in 2024 reaches the big screen this week. Terry Cline and his team of veteran videographers created the documentary “Honoring our Veterans: The Wall that Heals,” and veterans and volunteers who built the wall are invited to a showing at the Strand Theatre in Delaware on Nov. 12, the Marion Star reported in its MarionMade! feature, produced with Marion Technical College.
The Wall That Heals is the traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and its 2024 stop in Delaware became a community effort that the film sets out to preserve. One of the catalysts who helped bring the wall to central Ohio and make the documentary was Brian Galligher, a veteran who still serves in the Navy Reserves and directs the Delaware County Veterans Services Office, the Marion Star reported.
Cline was the only non-veteran on the film crew, the Marion Star reported. The crew included Alan Brown, a 24-year Air Force veteran; Gary Butterworth, a retired Navy commander; José Cardenas, a retired Air National Guard major; Kevin Evanoski, a Coast Guard veteran; Wayne Sells, an Air Force service member; and Bill Pivetta, an Air Force photographer with the Ohio Air National Guard.
The volunteers who appear in the story include Larry Crile, a Green Beret; Frank Hickman, a veteran; and Dave Hyatt, an Air Force veteran, who collaborated to bring the memorial to Delaware and create the documentary, the Marion Star reported. Retired Maj. Gen. Deborah Ashenhurst was the keynote speaker at the opening of the Wall That Heals in 2024.
Butterworth’s connection to the memorial runs to its beginning: he was at the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., the Marion Star reported — one of the threads that ties the Delaware visit, and the film about it, back to the original wall and the names it carries.
What happens next: after the Nov. 12 showing at the Strand Theatre in Delaware, the film will be free to watch on YouTube, and it will also be entered in the Worldfest-Houston independent film festival, the Marion Star reported.