What’s Up with the Huey?
If you’ve read or heard discussions regarding the Ohio Veterans Memorial Park (OVMP) grounds of Clinton Cemetery lately, you are likely familiar with the question:
“Why isn’t the Huey up yet, and why does it matter how it’s displayed?”
This post is our best public-facing answer grounded in the memorial’s own recorded history in 3095 Plus: Ohio’s Fallen (link), the 2007 Agreement to Erect a Permanent Memorial between the Clinton Cemetery Association and the OVMP organization, and Ohio cemetery law.
For many years, acquiring a Huey for the OVMP proved difficult, so when a Huey was finally acquired in 2025 from a seller in Texas, it was widely understood as a major milestone, especially among Vietnam veterans connected to the memorial. The 3095 Plus narrative frames the Huey’s installation as the completion of the memorial’s long‑held plans, bringing the original vision fully into place. However, concerns arose in the ensuing months when it appeared the Huey might be displayed in a way inconsistent with original plans and potentially executed without the level of professional design coordination required for a major, permanent monument.
The prior post in this series reveals how the OVMP is best understood when expanded into six defining legal layers, much like the image of a prism separating a single beam of light into the individual colors making it up. In that context, the middle two layers (Layers 3 and 4) are the Steward Organization, currently held by the OVMP organization, and the Fiduciaries.
Distinguishing an organization from its fiduciaries brings to light the separation of action from judgment. Whereas, the OVMP organization may exist to act in stewardship, the fiduciaries making up its board and officers exist to judge whether action is lawful, faithful, and appropriate. Directors and officers are fiduciaries because law imposes judgment obligations on them individually, regardless of culture, pressure, or mission intensity. The duties of fiduciaries are classic and unavoidable, and the realities of the current circumstances surrounding the Huey become clearest when viewed through the lens of these three duties.
Duty of Loyalty
The Fiduciaries have a duty of loyalty under which they must act for the benefit of the memorial’s Beneficiaries of Honor (Layer 6), and the Benefactors (Layer 5). The duty of loyalty means that fiduciaries must act faithfully for the purpose the organization exists to serve, honoring the purpose and meaning that others were promised and that they relied upon.
The development of the purpose and meaning of the OVMP can be traced back to July 19, 1966, the day Warrant Officer Jesus (“Jesse”) Delarosa Jr. died in Vietnam when the UH‑1 Huey helicopter he piloted collided with another aircraft, killing everyone aboard. The account of that day, down to the moment of the catastrophic collision, opens the OVMP’s story in 3095 Plus. Decades later, Jesse’s younger brother, Dan Delarosa, set out to honor him and every Ohioan who died in the Vietnam War. From the very beginning, the idea was a unified vision, pairing a wall of the names of Ohio’s 3095 fallen with a Huey helicopter displayed in the air.
From the earliest site searches and planning discussions, the Huey was integral to the storytelling architecture. The helicopter was meant to visually convey rescue, sacrifice, and the lived experience of Vietnam veterans, displayed in a way that communicated memory and reverence. But, in Vietnam, Hueys often had a partner, and as the memorial’s design took shape, that reality was reflected in the addition of the AH-1 Cobra. Cobra helicopters flew escort and fire-support missions to protect Hueys carrying troops in and out of danger. Veterans experienced these aircraft together as part of the same missions. That relationship is why the Cobra and the Huey became established as paired elements in the memorial design, and once a charitable purpose and its expression have been defined, loyalty requires preserving that meaning.
As the committee formed and began building public support, they carried a physical model of the memorial grounds to veterans’ posts, fairs, exhibits, and community events. Benefactors did not simply donate to “a memorial, someday.” They were shown a physical model, a specific arrangement, a particular relationship between the wall, the Huey, and the Cobra, and a depiction of elevation, inaccessibility, and reverence, so when they then gave money, gave labor, and gave time they did so relying on that vision. Reliance does not require a written promise. It requires reasonable expectation induced by representation, and, here, the representation was not subtle or incidental but was central to fundraising and support. Benefactors have the right to have their reliance honored, and the law protects donors by binding fiduciaries.
In contrast to more narrowly-focused monuments on the memorial grounds, the Huey and Cobra exist for a comprehensive set of beneficiaries: aircrews who flew them, troops transported, supported, or protected by them, the fallen and wounded connected to their use, and families whose losses are inseparable from those missions. This breadth of beneficiaries underscores the importance of the fiduciary duty to preserve the purpose and meaning for which the fixtures were created rather than treating them as discretionary displays.
The duty of loyalty owed to the Beneficiaries of Honor does not turn on whether alternative displays might also honor them. Loyalty requires faithfulness to the specific form through which honor was publicly defined and consistently presented on their behalf. Once that form, elevated, inaccessible, and reverent became the memorial’s voice, fiduciaries were no longer free to reinterpret it without betraying the very meaning they were entrusted to preserve. Loyalty to Layer 6 is not about pleasing beneficiaries. It is about keeping faith with how honor was promised on their behalf.
Duty of Obedience
The duty of obedience requires fiduciaries to ensure that their organization acts within the legal and structural limits placed on it, even when those limits are inconvenient or frustrating. It requires compliance with governing law, compliance with binding agreements, and ensuring the organization acts only within the permissions actually granted to it. In the context of the Huey, the OVMP organization was permitted to proceed only under specific legal and factual conditions, and fiduciaries are obligated to ensure those conditions are still being honored before action continues.
The 2007 Agreement allows improvements only insofar as they coincide with the development plans as indicated by an attached artist’s rendering and the contents of the Agreement. From the earliest presentations to the Association, including 3-D models and promotional videos, the Huey was consistently depicted as elevated in flight in a banked turn coming in behind the Cobra. Although those presentations, models, and videos were not literally attached to the Agreement, the Cemetery Association approved a specific memorial concept communicated through them, as they were incorporated by reference. Those materials clarified what the memorial would be, resolved ambiguities the attached artist’s rendering, alone, could not, and directly informed the Association’s exercise of its legal discretion, representing classic approval-based institutional reliance, wherein approval was conditioned upon an understood design reality.
Nonetheless, questions arose about whether alternative displays might be permissible, leading the Association to exercise its duty under cemetery law to formally resolve the issue through a binding cemetery rule, establishing the required display standard that the Huey be elevated, as originally planned in the 3-D models and visual design materials that were presented, and displayed in a manner similar to that of the helicopter already displayed on cemetery property.
Under Paragraph 11 of the 2007 Agreement, the OVMP organization is obligated at all times to comply with applicable laws and regulations. This includes Ohio cemetery law that governs cemetery property and provides that a cemetery association may prescribe rules for the erection of monuments and structures within a cemetery. Ohio law goes further in that it is unlawful to violate a cemetery’s bylaws, rules, or regulations. Proceeding in a manner inconsistent with the established display standard would therefore constitute noncompliance with governing cemetery law and a breach of the Agreement’s conditions of permission.
Certainly, the law can compel compliance after the fact, but the duty of obedience exists to ensure that fiduciaries do not let a steward organization drift into noncompliance in the first place. The duty of obedience represents more than simply doing something because the law says you have to. It requires fiduciaries to affirmatively ensure that the organization stays within the bounds of permission, authority, and reliance that make its existence as the steward organization lawful in the first place. In this case, the OVMP organization exists as the steward organization only because the Cemetery Association exercised discretion to permit this role, because permission was conditioned on understood design realities for the Memorial, and because governing law allows continued stewardship only so long as those conditions are honored. The duty of obedience requires fiduciaries to treat those conditions as limiting and explains why fiduciaries must say “No,” before the organization drifts beyond its lawful and moral boundaries.
Duty of Care
The duty of care requires fiduciaries to make decisions with the level of diligence, competence, and prudence that a reasonable person would exercise in similar circumstances. It means asking hard questions, insisting on qualified professional input, understanding risks, and not allowing urgency, symbolism, and goodwill to substitute for planning, safety, or regulatory compliance. In short, care is about how decisions are made and carried out, not just what is decided.
In practice, the duty of care requires fiduciaries to recognize when a project exceeds the limits of volunteer effort, informal planning, or internal expertise, and to insist on professional design, coordination, and risk management before action proceeds. In light of this, updated cemetery rules governing the Ohio Veterans Memorial Park grounds operationalize this duty by requiring that any major memorial feature installation, such as the Huey display, be designed and executed by a qualified professional outdoor design‑build firm, or by a coordinated team of licensed professionals operating under a designated lead firm. These rules require that a written installation plan be submitted in advance, identify the responsible design and construction professionals, demonstrate compliance with the 2007 Agreement, applicable Cemetery Association resolutions, all applicable laws and codes, and insurer requirements, and receive prior written authorization from the Cemetery Association before work proceeds. Importantly, authorization to proceed will be based on the qualifications and representations of the submitting professionals rather than representing a technical validation of construction methods.
These requirements do not exist to exert control or slow progress. They exist because fiduciaries cannot satisfy their duty of care by approving major, permanent installations without competent professional design, coordinated execution, and clear accountability for safety and compliance. If loyalty answers what must remain true and obedience answers what limits now apply because of that truth, care answers how action must be competently and safely carried out within those limits.
The Answer is the Questions
It wouldn’t have been difficult to distill this piece down to three bullet points, one regarding a cemetery rule, one regarding Ohio law pertaining to cemetery rules, and one regarding a single sentence that requires compliance with laws and regulations in an agreement that grants permission to act only as long as specific conditions are being met. But, even though the path of least resistance may lead to simply weighing organizational preference against institutional authority, the resolution to the Huey controversy far more meaningfully comes down to who must ask which questions, and why.
The three main sections above illustrate the classic fiduciary duties and have already provided the explanations and answers. But, it is questions that expose whether fiduciaries have actually done their job by having asked them.
The duty of loyalty means asking, “Who are the Beneficiaries of Honor for whom this monument exists, and what was the form through which honor was promised on their behalf? What representations induced reliance by benefactors and shaped the memorial’s meaning? And, at what point did discretion narrow because meaning had already been fixed?”
Likewise, the duty of obedience means asking, “What legal permissions allow the Steward Organization to act at all within an active cemetery, and on what representations and conditions was that permission granted? What governing rules, agreements, or laws now fix those conditions as binding constraints on how the Huey may be displayed, and at what point does proceeding differently become noncompliance, breach of license, or violation of governing law?”
Finally, the duty of care means asking, “What level of competence and diligence does the Huey installation require, and what expertise is reasonably required to evaluate and execute this installation competently? What risks will be foreseeable at the time judgment is required, and will they be adequately investigated and mitigated? And, at what point does proceeding without professional coordination constitute failure to exercise reasonable care in judgment in relenting to urgency or enthusiasm?”
Once reliance exists, discretion narrows. Once meaning is fixed, judgment replaces preference. Rules, approvals, and professional standards provide the facts and evidence. But, fiduciary law asks, “Did you ask the right questions at the right time?”
In that light, the Huey’s display is not a matter of renewed discretion, but of faithful execution of what was already promised, approved, and relied upon. For the Huey, the way forward is up.