Once a week, on Fridays from October 2003 until 2006, Fran O'briens Stadium Steak House at the corner of 16th and L streets NW in the basement of the Capital Hilton in Washington DC served free meals and drinks to veterans wounded in the service of their nation.
Then, the Hilton kicked them out
The downtown D.C. restaurant, which has hosted a decade's worth of power lunches, political dinners and salacious hookups, is more poignantly known for its Friday night steak dinners for severely wounded soldiers recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center....
Jim Mayer, a veteran who works at the Department of Veterans Affairs and who helped start the steak dinner tradition, is concerned that the hotel wants to eliminate the spectacle of hundreds of severely disabled soldiers coming in and out of its building or that the restaurant's repeated requests for a new elevator or escalator to accommodate them was too much.
But Hilton spokeswoman Lisa Cole said the hotel's position on the lease has nothing to do with the dinners. She said its decision was based strictly on business considerations.
O'Brien's owners knew their lease was coming up. But after months of negotiations, the hotel chain told them this week that it would not be renewed. The lease expires May 1.
Though a valiant effort was made, spearheaded by Milbloggers Blackfive, Greyhawk and others, the lease was indeed terminated.
For the past 2 1/2 years, O'Brien and business partner Hal Koster have made their thick steak dinners and a night of bottomless drinks one of the rites of passage for the soldiers who are steeling themselves for their postwar lives in wheelchairs or with prosthetic limbs.
They come to the subterranean restaurant, at the corner of 16th and L streets NW in the basement of the Capital Hilton, in volunteer's vans and trucks. They're carefully wheeled down the stairs or slowly negotiate the steps on crutches. It has become a tradition so beloved among veterans that Garry Trudeau featured the dinners in his Doonesbury comic strip.
Yes he did as you can see here.
But that is not the end of the story. After the demise of Fran O'briens, co-owner Hal Koster started the Aleethia Foundation which now continues the free dinners for severely wounded vets.
Five years ago, Koster began providing free steak dinners to wounded and injured troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq at his Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steak House, until the restaurant closed in 2006. Afterward, he said, dinners for these troops were held at several local eateries as well as the Capitol Hill Club, which holds a monthly dinner for the wounded warriors. Troop dinners also have been hosted by the Italian, Australian and several other embassies here, he said...
“The entire country has been behind these troops and it’s unfortunate what’s happened to them,” said Koster, an Army Vietnam veteran. “It’s been an absolute pleasure for me to meet them. I wish that I had met them under different circumstances, but that’s looking back and that’s not the direction they’re going – they’re going forward.”
These troops “provided a service to this country … the least we can do is buy them a dinner on Friday night,” Koster said. “There are a lot of organizations doing good things for the troops. Our focus has been on the newly-injured; to try to get them out of the hospital as soon as possible.”
The dinners are mostly private affairs, Koster said, in deference to the feelings of the troops and their families. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, he said, is a staunch supporter of the dinners and attends as many as he can.
“We keep these dinners in closed rooms so that they don’t have to be out in the general public,” Koster said, so as to foster the troops’ natural camaraderie and conversation flow.
Also, he said, troops that have undergone amputations as a result of their wounds can be self-conscious about their injuries and initially worry about how they are perceived by the public.
When injured troops are first healing, “they don’t want people to see them, for example when they’ve lost an arm and can’t cut their food right … it’s not as difficult to ask your buddy next to you to cut your food if your buddy is missing both legs,” Koster explained.
Yes, the free dinners are back. But the Aleethia Foundation does more than this.
The Aleethia Foundation was started to provide a method of tax-deductible contributions to fund Friday Night Dinners at Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steakhouse. In the process of providing the dinners, we found some of the troops in need of small financial grants ($1,500 to $2,500) to bridge different financial situations. We then expanded our mission to providing as many of these small grants as we could. We also found a need to do more than just the dinners, so we started supplying other short-term recreational activities such as siteseeing drives, trips to movies, and smaller dinner situations.
We are a small group of volunteers. There is no paid staff and no overhead. We spend all collected money on the troops.
Who needs the Hilton anyway?
Back when the Friday Night dinners were held exclusively at Fran O'Briens, Blackfive pointed out that proprietors Hal and Marty did not treat the Vets like heroes
I can hear some of you gasping in surprise.
Hal and Marty do not treat our men and women as heroes. They do much better for those who gave us so much and are away from their units, their hometowns, their friends recovering from their wounds.
Hal and Marty treat our wounded troops like family.
And that makes the Aleethia Foundation heroic.
