LENA, Wis. (WBAY) – Normally, veteran memorials are found in parks or cemeteries. But for Marine veteran Mike Vizer, who served from 1989 to 1993, you can find one in his front yard in Lena, WI.

With the help of a GoFundMe, he built a one-of-a-kind memorial to honor marines from his unit, Suicide Charley, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment.

Each dog tag on the display has the name of every Suicide Charley Marine killed in action, from WWII to present.

“Suicide Charley was one of the, is one of the most storied Marine Corp Infantry companies that has had numerous medal of honor winners. Some of the greatest heroes of the Marine Corp have been associated with Suicide Charley,” said Vizer.

Next to the display, Vizer built a recreation of the iconic flag-raising photo taken during the Battle of Iwo Jima that sits in Washington D.C.

“Just seeing the people and react to the monument, react to the dog tags, it really hit home, for me emotionally as well. I just think it was such a blessing to have everybody here, just be apart of that is very special, something I’ll never forget,” said Vizer.

Two years ago, the United States Marine Corps announced that for 74 years they had misidentified another one of the six fighting men in the photo.

It was actually Corporal Harold Keller in the photo that remains one of the most famous of all time, not Pfc. Rene Gagnon.

“There’s a lot more to him than just, he was the second man on the flag, he was a wonderful human being,” said Steve Maurer, son-in-law of Cpl. Harold Keller.

Harold Keller’s daughter, Kay Maurer, and his son-in-law, Steve, drove from Iowa to be at this dedication ceremony on Saturday morning.

“Growing up, once in awhile people would come up and say ‘I heard from my parents that your dad was on the Flag Raising,’ and I would go ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, he never talks about it,’” said Kay.

“Never told a soul that this ever happened, and we just discovered two years ago. But the amazing thing about the whole deal that I just cannot get past, is that how somebody can go to this war and see the terrible things that he saw four four years, come home, raise a family, the guy was as normal as anybody you’d see on the street,” said Steve.

After Keller survived he war, him and his wife, Ruby, had three children and raised them in Brooklyn, Iowa where Keller was born and lived his whole life.

“He was a tremendous father, he was very, very active, very involved in our lives, patience beyond a saint, and very involved in the community,” said Kay.

Keller died in 1979 from a heart attack, but his legacy will always live on.

“I love this, and I’m so honored that people want to recognize his war efforts. What Mike has done here is amazing. I hope the whole world comes and sees it, because it’s well done” said Kay.

Mike and with the help of his family, have built a beautiful memorial in their yard located at 6348 Logtown Rd. in Lena, WI.

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Nolan Forbes of Aurora recently spent four active-duty years in the U.S. Marine Corps, but he remembers most fondly just six months at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq.

Forbes, 23, was a Marine from 2015 to 2019, rising to the rank of corporal.

“It’s a company-level job but we only had a platoon out there (at the embassy), so we were pretty stretched-thin with our duties,” Forbes said of his time at the embassy in Baghdad. “We did that rotation for six months with no days off or anything.”

Forbes’ platoon served as guards for the huge embassy grounds.

“We went on deployment there in the summer of ’17,” Forbes said.

“It was hot, and especially on a windy day it just felt like a furnace was blowing into the window of the post,” he said. As guards he and platoon-mates were stationed in raised “posts” along the walls around the perimeter of the embassy.

“Each post had a machine gun and a couple of rocket launchers, and one post on each side had a grenade launcher,” Forbes said, “and we also had a ‘javelin’ on every post — a missile launcher that launches a ‘smart missile’ that you can lock on at a target and then shoot it out” and it will “go at” the moving target. “It’s pretty cool.”

“We took IDF — indirect fire — a couple times. It was either ISIS or some Shia militia group that shot rockets at the embassy over the city,” he added.

Forbes and his platoon were at the embassy during the battle for Mosul, in northern Iraq, which was carried out by Iraqi forces — supported, Forbes said, by a team of U.S. forces on the ground outside the city.

“The Iraqis got pretty messed up but they ended up winning. When they won the battle of Mosul, all around Baghdad there were people shooting off fireworks — it was like the Fourth of July,” he said.

Some Iraqis set up a bazaar inside the embassy “and they would sell stuff like hats that said ‘Make Iraq Great Again,’” Forbes said.

Boot camp came first for Forbes, of course — in October 2015 in San Diego.

“I did that for three months — getting yelled at and all that,” he said. Next he served briefly as a Marine recruiter’s assistant in Grand Island.

In addition to boot camp and the position in Baghdad, Forbes spent lots of time receiving other courses of training in both general Marine infantry skills as well as preparations for specific assignments.

His training preceding the Baghdad assignment was at Twenty-Nine Palms in the Mojave Desert in California. His assignment for Iraq was in the first battalion of the 7th Marines, Company C — referred to as “Suicide Charley,” a “very old company that has history that goes back to 1942,” Forbes said.

“When we first showed up we had to memorize the history of Suicide Charley and be able to recite it from memory, otherwise they’d ‘play with you’ and it wasn’t a good time.”

Forbes also worked for six months as a gate guard at a camp in Okinawa.

Did he have opportunities to wear “dress blues,” the Marines’ distinctive dark-blue dress uniform?

“The only time we wore our dress uniforms was at the Marine Corps Ball,” he said. “We’d drink together and do whatever other shenanigans we got up to out there.”

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