NEWINGTON - Twenty-seven years in the Army National Guard and a year-long tour of combat duty in Iraq, and Lesbia Nieves--the Guard’s first Hispanic woman to be named lieutenant colonel--says that she would be willing to do the latter again.

       â€�"I got all I needed from that tour,” said Nieves, who served from February 2004 to February 2005 during Operation Iraqi Freedom. â€�"But I’m ready to go back if duty calls.”

       Nieves stood behind the podium in Newington Town Hall before a crowd of town residents and uniformed veterans as the guest speaker for Newington’s Veteran’s Day ceremony last Tuesday, Nov. 11.

       In a row of chairs behind her sat Deputy Mayor Clark Castelle; town councilors Maureen Klett and David Nagel; state Reps. Gary Byron, Sandy Nafis and Tony Guerrera; and state Sen. Paul Doyle.

       A Manchester native, Nieves remembered coming to Newington in December of 2004, right before she was deployed to Iraq.

       â€�"The outpouring of support from this town was just incredible,” she said. â€�"To me, it will always be engraved in my mind-the fire truck waving that American flag. Newington will always have a place in my heart.”

       Nine years later, Newington opened Victory Gardens, an affordable housing complex for low income veterans, not far from the Veteran’s Administration Hospital.

       â€�"We need to ensure that we take care of [veterans] and their families,” Nieves said. â€�"The veteran’s journey is a lifelong journey. Their scars are deep--they take a lifetime to heal. I urge every single one of you to take part in that process.”

       Since graduating from Allegany High School in Cumberland, Md., in 1965, Castelle has seen many of his classmates, veterans of the Vietnam War, dealing with those scars.

       â€�"Not one of them went on to live normal lives,” he said after the ceremony.

       Castelle sees them every five years at class reunions and he always apologizes.

       â€�"Veteran’s Day has always been a difficult day of reflection for me going all the way back to the summer of 1965,” Castelle said during his speech. â€�"That was the year that most of my friends either enlisted in the U.S. military or got drafted to fight in Vietnam, while the few of us who went on to college were beneficiaries of the famous--or maybe I should say infamous--2S Draft Deferment.”

       That allowed college students temporary exemption from the draft for the length of time it took to finish their degrees. Castelle was amongst those who received the deferment when he went to Johns Hopkins University.

       â€�"A temporary deferment that for nearly all of us turned out to be permanent,” he said. â€�"So I’ve never stopped apologizing to my classmates for accepting the unequal burden from the American military at that time, which obligated healthy young men who didn’t go to college--and that was the vast majority in those days, at least in the part I grew up in--to fight our wars for us.”

       The ceremony featured renditions of â€�"God Bless America,” the â€�"Marine’s Hymn” and â€�"America the Beautiful” by the Newington Singing Seniors.

       Former councilor Beth Delbuono read the names of Newington residents lost in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War while members of the Newington High School Key Club placed flowers in front of the Town Hall building’s outside memorial.