07/13/2026
From Merced Community page. What are your thoughts? $10 MILLION DOLLARS FOR A PARK TO HONOR A FOREIGN GENERAL IN MERCED, CALIFORNIA WHILE 1ST LT. PETER GALLO, WHO GAVE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE, HAS NEVER HAD SO MUCH AS A BENCH DEDICATED TO HIM BY HIS CITY
Merced is spending $10 million in public resources on a park anchored by a monument to a foreign general, while no comparable civic honor exists for the American Vietnam veterans of this community who wore this country's uniform.
He was not a U.S. soldier; he ran a CIA proxy force.
Vang Pao commanded a foreign paramilitary army funded and directed by American intelligence, not the U.S. military. He never took an oath to the United States. The distinction matters: a park named for a general honors him as a head of state and commander, not as a veteran, which is precisely the honor being withheld from the actual American veterans who served alongside his forces and came home to nothing like a $10 million park.
The human cost of his leadership fell hardest on children.
His army, initially 40,000 strong, absorbed such catastrophic losses that by the late 1960s he was conscripting boys as young as ten and men over 45, because the generation in between had been killed off. That is not an incidental wartime statistic, it is a direct index of command decisions and a war of attrition he kept feeding with a shrinking pool of adult men. A monument that omits this converts a documented humanitarian failure into an uncomplicated hero story.
The o***m trade wasn't a rumor, it was corroborated by his own CIA handlers.
His own case officer, Tony Poe, said Vang Pao personally profited from supplying o***m to a South Vietnamese he**in syndicate and banked millions in Switzerland and the U.S. CIA Director William Colby stated plainly that Hmong-grown o***m was turned into he**in and flown to Vietnam, where it was sold to American troops, with some reaching the U.S. Villages that refused conscription had their rice and o***m sales withheld until they complied, economic coercion used as a recruitment tool against the same communities he's now being honored for protecting.
This isn't a fringe objection, two other cities already rejected it.
Madison's parks commission dropped a park-naming plan in 2002, and its school board later reconsidered naming an elementary school after him, both times after historians laid out the same ex*****on and drug-trafficking allegations. Merced would be reviving a proposal that better-resourced cities already looked at and backed away from.
What Merced should do instead:
If the city wants to spend $10 million honoring wartime service tied to this community, a monument or park recognizing local American Vietnam veterans, men who took the oath, wore the uniform, and in many cases never got a homecoming parade, is a cleaner, less contested use of that money and that land.
How about we honor Peter Joseph Gallo
Born 1946, son of Joseph Gallo, founder of Joseph Farms of Livingston, one of California's largest dairy operations, based in Merced County. He attended Livingston High School, Merced College, and Cal Poly. He enlisted in the Army in February 1966, went through Officer Candidate School, and served as an armor instructor at Fort Lewis, Washington, before deploying. He was killed in action in Vietnam on March 30, 1968, as a First Lieutenant.
His siblings, Mike Gallo (now CEO of Joseph Gallo Farms and Joseph Farms Cheese) and Linda Jelacich, along with their spouses Lori Gallo and Kenny Jelacich, founded the Peter Gallo Memorial Foundation roughly 40 years ago, dedicated to supporting military veterans and first responders. Their work includes:
Annual funding of the Merced Sunrise Rotary's Field of Honor, a display of 1,000 U.S. flags at Merced College every Veterans Day.
An $80,000 gift in 2018 to remodel Merced College's veterans center, renamed the First Lieutenant Peter Joseph Gallo Veterans Resource Center, which now serves about 150 veterans, active reservists, and their dependents.
Serving as presenting sponsors, alongside the Jelacichs, in bringing The Wall That Heals (the traveling three-quarter-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial) to Merced College in March 2024, its only Northern California stop that year.
Mike Gallo was honored with Merced College's President's Medallion in 2018 in recognition of the foundation's work.
So, a private family, using private money, has spent four decades honoring one American KIA and veterans broadly, while the city itself has never named so much as a bench after him, yet is preparing to spend $10 million in public funds on a park for a foreign general.
Stop the madness!
