Wreaths Across America Day was this past weekend, December 17, 2022. It was for the 2021 event, described below, that Gold Star Mother Jill Williams made her pilgrimage to honor her son. That day saw wreath-laying events at 3,136 different locations across the country. The fallen were remembered as each name was said aloud and honored. More than 525 truckloads of wreaths were delivered by 390 different carriers and more than two million volunteers, a third of whom were children, helped place 2.4 million veterans' wreaths on headstones across the country.Wreaths Across America
"I don't check Facebook and my email all the time," she says, but this day Williams, then a 60-year-old account executive for a Fortune 500 company, stumbled upon a video that would summon her from her busy life in Durango, Colorado, to an eight-day pilgrimage. She would fly to Maine in the cold of December, spend a few days in the Norman Rockwell-esque town of Columbia Falls, then journey by convoy to Arlington National Cemetery. She would stop every hundred miles or so along the eastern seaboard for ceremonies of remembrance, then bed down for the night. She would break bread with bikers, cops and truckers.
Jill Williams, pictured with the truck piloted by one of those truckers.
Williams described the video this way: "There were hundreds of thousands of people at Arlington to greet the convoy, waving their hands and flags, and thousands of volunteers to lay the wreaths. Then it zoomed in on [one] grave. It was my son’s."
The video was produced by Wreaths Across America, an organization devoted to the coordination of wreath-laying ceremonies across the United States.
Williams' son, Warrant Officer William Joseph McCotter, had served in the prestigious Third U.S. Infantry Regiment, traditionally known as “The Old Guard.” Duties of the Old Guard include escorting the president, performing ceremonial duties around Washington, and guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington.
"He was recruited for that. He fit the mold perfectly,” she said. "He left the Old Guard to become a warrant officer, and then a Black Hawk pilot."
