Local businessman and Vietnam War veteran Michael Militello is among the latest inductees into the New York State Veterans Hall of Fame. He was honored in a special ceremony July 1 at Veterans Memorial Park in the City of Tonawanda.
It’s been decades since he served in Vietnam, but he has one last outstanding mission to fulfill. It’s to find a nurse who helped treat his combat wounds. A nurse who happened to be from Tonawanda, New York.
“I haven't seen her in 58 years. Linda Pickert,” said Militello on the day he was being recognized. “I looked for her, and I just found somebody in this chapter that says he went to high school with her. She saved my life. I wouldn't be standing. I'd be in a wheelchair, but I'd still be a little spunky, I guess.”
Growing up as one of six children in his boyhood home in Buffalo’s West Side, Militello worked during his teens promoting dances at local VFW Halls. He later enrolled at the University at Buffalo. On his birthday, he received his draft notice and weeks later was on his way to Vietnam.
There, he suffered multiple gunshot wounds in a Viet Cong ambush.
“They pulled me off a stretcher plane, rolled me into a medevac unit in Cu Chi, and there was a blackout, which I could have been dead or not,” Militello recalled. “When I woke up, there was a nurse standing over me, and her name was Linda Pickert.”
That nurse, he explained, would irrigate his legs, a treatment he says spared them from amputation. It was this point of the story when he struggled to contain his emotions.
“She stood over my bed and said… we're going to be fine.”
Militello learned his nurse was from Tonawanda. After hospitalization in Vietnam, then Japan, and later the United States, Militello returned to everyday life, but struggled to find work. He was one of the many returning veterans who didn’t come home to a hero’s welcome.
After having difficulty finding a job, he decided to go into business for himself. He bought Milligan’s Brick Bar. It would become the first of several Buffalo bars and restaurants he and his brother Bobby would own over the years.
Among those paying tribute to Militello at his recognition ceremony July 1 was Stephen Banko III, a longtime field office director for U.S. Housing and Urban Development office in Buffalo and a communications director for then Buffalo Mayor Anthony Masiello in the mid-1990s.
Banko also happens to be the most highly decorated Vietnam veteran in Western New York.
“We were taught to kill in Vietnam. But when we came home, nobody really taught us how to live. One of the things that we're recognizing today is a gentleman who has all taught us how to live, who taught us what it was like to come home, to keep your chin up, to keep pushing against the wind and to build something not only better for himself and his family but for all of us Vietnam veterans who knew him and know him today,” Banko said.
Militello, with Banko’s help, has written a book about his experiences. It’s expected to be released in November. The book, he says, will highlight his interaction with the nurse he credits with saving his life.
Now equipped with the knowledge of her alma mater, he continues his quest to find her. What might he say to her if he succeeds?
“I don't know for sure,” Militello replied. “I've thought about it a million times.”
