Some have suggested Vietnam demonstrated the danger of trying to conduct a guns AND butter war, that is, we send people off to fight while back on the home front, very little changes. If that's the theory, then I guess it's true, since while we had sappers trying to clear mines from rice paddies in monsoons we also had half a million gather in the mud of Yasgur's Farm. And when all the toking and joking was over, the ages of everybody were practically identical, though I think the guys humping it through weeds were younger, but also older.
I lost a prep school classmate in that war and from what I've been told by long-time residents of Norwich, the city 'lost' twelve young men in the Vietnamese War. When I'm feeling angry and bitter at how survivors were treated, I'm tempted to offer that they weren't lost at all, but that's disrespectful to both their memories and to those who came home wounded in places that will never heal and were left to their own devices as the rest of us raced to forget what we never knew enough about in the first place.
Rex tremendae majestatis. Welcome home.
-bill kenny
2 comments:
The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, DC is one of the most stunning places I've ever visited. I have been there twice. Both times I was struck by the men and women standing at the wall searching for a particular name and, then, their reaction to locating it.
I had for the last decade or so on the corkboard on the wall to the left of my office desk a rubbing I made of Roy's place on the wall. A volunteer had to help me do it as behind my shades I was crying so much I could barely see.
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