Dave Bakke: POW bracelet still meaningful (Leland Hildebrand)

Donna Bowers was a teenager in the early 1970s, when she received her POW bracelet. The name on the bracelet was Col. Leland Hildebrand. There was a date with the name: 12/18/71.

Those bracelets were worn in honor of American soldiers missing or taken prisoner in the Vietnam War. That’s something we won’t have when the war in Afghanistan is over, not on that scale. There were thousands of them then, and Hildebrand was one.

“I really don’t remember how I got it,” Donna says. “The best I can figure out, it was from my grandmother. She was still a member of D

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