Sunday marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975, which inspired the organizing committee behind the event to use the anniversary to hold “The Parade that Never Happened.”

The auditorium was filled with many Vietnam veterans, representatives of Gold Star families and members of the public, who came to reflect on the conflict and remember the fallen listed on a replica of the Vietnam Memorial Wall with the names of North Dakotans and South Dakotans killed in action.

Retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Michael Miller, a 1970 graduate of Minot High School, was the keynote speaker at the celebration. Miller said when he was invited to speak at the celebration, he reached out to retired Rear Admiral Robert Shumaker and former aviator, who is credited with coining the phrase “Hanoi Hilton” while he was a prisoner of war at the infamous Hoa Lo Prison in North Vietnam for eight years and a day.

“He’s a true officer and a gentleman and I decided I would seek his advice to see what I should talk about to such an esteemed group,” Miller said. “He told me, ‘Mike, just relate your own personal experiences. Don’t try to tell someone else’s story. Remind them what it was like during the war because it is the context of the war that is as important as the conduct that Americans need to remember.'”

Miller said, as a North Dakotan, honesty is the best policy, and he did not serve in the Vietnam War, as he was at the U.S. Naval Academy and flight training for the majority of the conflict. Miller lauded the veterans assembled in the auditorium for answering the call to serve their country, saying it was, “the honorable thing to do.”

“Patriotism on the Great Plains was, as it is today, what we in the military would call standard operating procedure. We might not have wanted to go to Southeast Asia, but we understand why it was important,” Miller said. “Today’s historians have dismissed the Domino Theory, but in my humble opinion, had we not stood up to the spread of communism in the ’60s, today’s world, as difficult as it is to contemplate, could easily have been more chaotic, more violent and far more dangerous. Someone had to cut the sinews of that cancerous ideology, and that someone was us.”

Miller recalled during his time directing the White House Military Office in Washington, D.C., the majority of visitors would request to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. Miller said he found this interesting, as it is unique among the memorials situated in the nation’s capital, and yet is among the most visited.

“It truly is monumental in the sense that sometimes less is more. I suspect that you too have experienced the power of that hidden valley, that marble scar on the edge of the Mall,” Miller said. “It’s a solemn reminder of the war. As strange as it is to say, it’s even more powerful after a snowfall.”

Miller spoke about the division within the nation regarding the war, and the hostility that Vietnam veterans returned home to. He declared that, “The Parade that Never Happened,” was “a national shame.”

“There were no parades when I got home as there were not for any of you. Those that had chosen to wear the cloth of the nation, who had written that blank check payable to the United States of America in the amount up to and including their lives, prevented from wearing their uniforms. If the phrase ‘Democracy dies in darkness’ is true, then surely patriotism dies in shame,” Miller said. “The North Dakotans we celebrate today gave their all for their brothers on either side of them for the service, for their nation, that we may here at home may remain the land of the free of the home of the brave. They did not think it was a sacrifice unworthy of their heroic efforts and neither should we.”