The L Company Rangers Fallen Heroes Foundation The L Company Rangers Fallen Heroes Foundation is a nonprofit foundation that was founded in January of 2024. It is a fund that falls under the organizational umbrella of the Community Foundation of Carroll County. Alfonso “Big Al” Parada is a Carroll County, Maryland resident, the founder and the current president and treasurer of the L Company Fallen Rangers Foundation Service Board. Other members of the Service Board are Dave Rothwell, vice-president, Steve Barr, secretary, and John Perez and Bobby Badeaux as members-at-large. You can learn more about the Community Foundation of Carroll County by going to their website at WeAreCarroll.org.
The origin of our foundation has its roots in a fishing trip to Alaska in 2007 organized by Dave “Muldoon” Rothwell in 2007. Dave wanted to invite Dale “Pugsley” Hardy who lives in Michigan but didn’t have the resources at the time. Knowing that “Pugs” was isolated and could benefit greatly from reuniting with his Ranger brothers, Muldoon put out the call to the Ranger community to lend a hand. A number of Rangers responded and “Pugs” was able to make the trip. We hope “Pugs” has benefitted as much from these reunions as we all have from having “Pugs” inject his unique sense of humor to all our gatherings. One of those contributors and a frequent participant to all our gatherings was Louie Distretti. Louie regaled us with his folksy Southern wisdom and humor until he contracted pancreatic cancer and sadly passed away on March 17, 2022. Since then the informal fund to help our fellow Rangers has been called “the Louie fund”, administered by “Muldoon” with the assistance of others. The Louie fund has been used to help our fellow Rangers get to our biannual reunions which have recently taken place at Fort Benning, Georgia (2019), Moline, Illinois (2021), and Scott, Louisiana (2023). Our next reunion will take place April 22-25, 2025, at the Silverton Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. The fund has also sent flowers and condolences to our fallen Rangers. You can learn more about Louie Distretti in the button on this website entitled “A Life of Service”.
As the informal “Louie fund” became organized into the L Company Rangers Fallen Heroes Foundation we took upon ourselves several additional responsibilities. One of these is the organization of our biannual reunions which were previously organized by individual Rangers who donated their time and local venues for this effort. We also hope to generate funds to help disadvantaged Rangers to attend these reunions, as well as assist with any other needs that may arise due to age, health or other reasons. We have taken over the administration of two web sites: LCoRangers.org which is the website for this foundation, and RLTW.LCompanyRangers.com which is a site for Rangers to post and find images of our time served in Vietnam. Finally, we have acquired nine large cases of documents which fallen Ranger Randy White accumulated over many years of research pertaining to our time and units in Vietnam. We are in the process of digitizing all these documents and making them available online so our fellow Rangers can research available records for any particular mission on any date and time. We hope this will help in the healing process and provide answers to questions about what transpired on particular missions.
We thank our fellow Rangers and all others who continue to contribute to this valuable and meaningful work.
Alfonso “Big Al” Parada
President Service Board
L Company Rangers Fallen Heroes Foundation
Comments