While in high school in Snow Hill, Md., friends Bobby Purnell and Frederick Bivens Jr. both planned to go into the armed services. After graduation in 1965, Bivens left for Vietnam.
In 1967, Purnell was getting ready to follow. Days before he left, he learned his friend had been killed in combat.
Purnell, who went on to serve three tours as a Marine, drove a trailer 13 hours from Jacksonville, Fla., to D.C. for the Memorial Day weekend with his wife, a trip he’s made nearly every year since 2006. His mind went to the “good times” with Bivens, and he wondered — as he does often — why he’s alive when others aren’t.
On Sunday, Purnell, 76, was among thousands of leather-clad veterans and supporters who rode their motorcycles across the capital, leaving in their wake a roar of engines that lived up to the event’s original name, Rolling Thunder.
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“The pain I feel in my heart is why I’m still here,” said Purnell. “Most vets that were wounded will say, ‘Why am I still here when so many are gone?’”
The event was started by Vietnam War veterans in 1988, and nearly every year since riders have come to the capital. In 2020, American Veterans (Amvets) took the event over from the original organizers and changed the name to Rolling to Remember, a more direct nod to the riders’ causes: the plights of prisoners of war, soldiers missing in action and veteran suicide.
The riders gathered in the Pentagon parking lot early Sunday, organizing their motorcycles in careful rows. They rode over the Memorial Bridge and down Constitution Avenue, displaying American and POW/MIA flags and an assortment of patches and medals on their jackets: Vietnam War Veteran, Iraq War Veteran, a thin blue line flag. One jacket had the phrase Black Lives Matter, another a patch reading, “These are my church clothes.”
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Memorial Day is a federal holiday honoring those who lost their lives while serving in the U.S. armed forces, and the dead were on the minds of Sunday’s riders. At the front of the demonstration, a handful of men sported crisp white button-up shirts under their leather vests, a signal of respect for the women escorted on the back of their bikes: Gold Star mothers, the mothers of service members who were killed or missing in action.
The Defense Department estimates that nearly 81,000 service members are still missing from World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other conflicts. The department’s Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency leads the government’s efforts searching for POW and MIA service members.
Many veterans who make it home suffer from severe physical and mental health problems. The most recent data from the Department of Veterans Affairs shows that 6,392 veterans died by suicide in 2021, an increase of 114 deaths from the year before.
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“You’d be hard-pressed to find a veteran … who hasn’t lost somebody to suicide,” said Joseph Chenelly, the national director of Amvets and a veteran who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. On his jacket he had a patch for suicide prevention. “I think that’s a big part of the momentum that we built with this.”
Vietnam War veterans Ray Manzo and Artie Muller started the event in 1988 to demand accountability for POW and MIA service members. Imagining the rumble the motorcycles would make, they named it after Operation Rolling Thunder, the three-year bombing campaign in North Vietnam. In 2019, Muller stopped organizing it, and Chenelly continued the movement under the new name.
Robert Cox, 54, served in the Air Force in Panama and during Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War. He chose to ride to pay tribute to veterans, POWs and his uncle, who served in the Navy in Okinawa during World War II and is missing in action. His family does not know what happened to him.
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“We think he is somewhere at the bottom of the Pacific,” Cox said. “It is very hard, and the Pentagon isn’t very helpful.”
Harry Clarke, 66, is a member of the Maryland chapter of the Blue Knights Motorcycle Club with Cox. He served in the Army and came to support veterans like his nephew, who served in Iraq and has PTSD. He said that they talk weekly and that there needs to be more resources dedicated to the mental health challenges facing veterans.
“It’s too slow,” Clarke said, “and not a lot is available.”
John Prata rode from Tunkhannock, Pa., on his gray touring bike with his life partner on the back, sporting American flags and a Trump 2024 flag. A disabled veteran, he served in the Navy in 13 countries before going to work for the Defense Department.
“Every one of us has gone down, picked ourselves up, and healed ourselves body and spirit,” he said, gesturing at the people and motorcycles surrounding him in the Pentagon parking lot. “And everyone here has a common love of riding and life.”
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On the back of his jacket, and the jackets of two friends that he came with, was written in bold letters “Freedom in Recovery” — a phrase they decided on after bonding over their struggles with addiction. Laurie Hudak put a patch of wings on her jacket that she got from her father, Charles Chamberlin, who served in Vietnam and died two years ago. The night before, while getting dinner at the Hill Country Barbecue Market in D.C., they met a homeless veteran and gave him dinner.
“When the vets come back, lots get help, but some don’t. They turn to drugs, alcohol. If one of them turned to us, we’d help them,” said Chris Snigar, Hudak’s fiancé. “All they have to do is reach out.”
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