Annual Warriors Rock concert set for Sunday at new location

The performance honors veterans through music and videos.

When the fifth annual Warriors Rock concert begins Sunday afternoon, Dave Papak wants everyone in the Ringgold Middle School Auditorium focused on the stage.

That may be the biggest change for an event that has grown into a Mon Valley tradition honoring veterans and first responders through music and storytelling.

After drawing an estimated 1,500 people to the Monongahela Aquatorium last year, Warriors Rock is moving indoors to Ringgold Middle School for Sunday’s performance.

The auditorium will provide a much different atmosphere, one Papak believes will make the stories at the heart of the concert even more powerful.

“It’s a great event, but this time, everyone will be focused on the stage for two hours,” Papak said. “It’s going to be a good show. People will go wild.”

Doors open at 2 p.m., with the concert running from 3 to 5 p.m. Tickets are nearly sold out. For tickets, call Kate Papak at 443-799-0325.

Warriors Rock, founded by Gary and Kim Racan and featuring Racan’s Studio E Band, combines live music with professionally produced video interviews telling the stories of veterans and first responders.

Seven people will be honored this year.

For Papak, a retired U.S. Marine brigadier general from Carroll Township who organizes the Mon Valley concert, those individual stories serve a larger purpose.

Years ago, he began thinking about what would happen if the concert could recognize seven or eight people annually and continue doing so for a decade or more.

“I could be long gone, but that is 100 people we have connected to generations and communities that would not have a clue they served,” Papak said.

And they don’t need to have earned the nation’s highest military decorations to have a story worth preserving.

“You don’t have to be some crazy Navy SEAL, Silver Star recipient,” Papak said. “Maybe you said yes to the draft in 1968, or you got in line after Pearl Harbor with everyone else to serve.”

That idea of ordinary people answering an extraordinary call will run throughout Sunday’s program.

Papak, who has nine grandchildren, said he thinks often about whether younger generations understand what it has cost to sustain the country over its 250-year history.

“It was paid by people on this stage Sunday afternoon,” he said.

That history is especially relevant in the Mon Valley, he said, where generations of residents not only served in uniform but worked in the mills that produced steel for ships, tanks and aircraft during World War II.

Papak said patriotism can’t simply be taught from a textbook.

It can be learned, he said, by seeing flags lining a street, attending a Memorial Day parade or standing with a hand over one’s heart during the national anthem at a high school football game.

Sunday’s program will also bring military tradition and younger generations together on the Ringgold stage.

At the end of the first set, Papak will introduce a color guard carrying the flags of the six branches of the U.S. military.

Three members of the color guard will come from the Army Reserve’s 14th Quartermaster Company in Greensburg, a unit whose history carries a painful connection to Operation Desert Storm. On Feb. 25, 1991, an Iraqi Scud missile struck a barracks housing members of the unit in Dhahran, SaudiArabia.

Thirteen soldiers from the 14th Quartermaster Company were killed and 43 were wounded in the attack, one of the deadliest single incidents for American forces during the Gulf War.

Three other participants in the color guard will represent the local Brothers’ Keeper organization: Steve Molek, Dave Ziolecki and John Dora. The nonprofit assists veterans in need while working to raise awareness about veteran suicide and supporting veterans’ health needs. Its efforts include raising money to help provide service dogs for veterans.

The American flag will be carried by Eli Criswell of Finleyville, a 2026 Ringgold High School graduate who earned the rank of Eagle Scout in December. Criswell will soon begin his studies at Washington & Jefferson College.

For Papak, bringing a recent Ringgold graduate into the ceremony fits with one of his goals for Warriors Rock: making sure another generation doesn’t simply hear about service and sacrifice, but sees people in its own community representing those values.

Another solemn moment will come at the end of the second set.

Because firearms cannot be brought onto school property, the Mon Valley Honor Guard’s traditional rifle salute was recorded during the Memorial Day ceremony at Monongahela Cemetery in May. That performance will be shown on the auditorium screen.

The salute will be followed by Taps, with two buglers from Bugles Across America participating in the ceremony.

Papak expects that portion of the program to be among the afternoon’s most emotional.

“If you have never heard it with an echo, and you don’t choke up, you’re not alive,” he said. “That is how moving it actually is.”

Planning for each year’s concert begins around March, when Papak and volunteers start putting the pieces together. After seeing Ringgold’s auditorium and speaking with school officials, he began envisioning what the more controlled setting could add to the production.

At the Aquatorium, people could come and go, talk or turn their attention elsewhere. This year, Papak said, buying a ticket and taking one of the auditorium’s 620 seats represents a more deliberate decision to experience the stories.

And when the concert reaches its conclusion, the focus will return to the people Warriors Rock was created to recognize. Veterans in attendance will be invited toward the stage for the finale, continuing one of the show’s most emotional traditions.

For Papak, however, he’ll also be looking at the young people sitting in the auditorium. He wants them to leave understanding that the freedoms they inherited have a history, a cost and, often, the face of someone who lived in the same community they do.

That, more than anything, is the story he wants Warriors Rock to keep telling.

“Two hundred and fifty years of paying the price to allow us to live and the way we live,” Papak said.