Remember Charlie, Remember Baker

History is a funny thing. Today fades right into yesterday before your very eyes and then because it was so subtle you almost but not quite forget about it. Almost.

Today, forty-nine years ago, I was getting rousted out of a perfectly good bunk in a barracks somewhere on Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, by a fireplug of a man with a Smokie-the-Bear hat, SSGT Griffey. I was a month (plus a few days) into Basic Training, but the news headlines were being made half a world away with the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. 

I grew up in an era when history was reduced to the memorization of dates and events to be parroted back on test days. Still, even in today's world of alt-facts and fake news, I'm confident so many years down memory lane we, as a country, have never really made our peace with that war, the way we fought it, the way it ended and most especially with how we treated those who came back though never home from it.

And we still have large numbers of young and not-so-young men and women, deployed across the globe serving our national strategic interests and furthering our foreign policy objectives while I sit in front of my big screen and bitch about the two hundred channels of cable I get.

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 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 monsoon season 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.

But the Vietnam War, as all wars are, was less geopolitics and more personal loss and grief across a generation. I was still finding buildings and classrooms as a wide-eyed freshman at Rutgers when I lost forever a Manhattan prep school classmate, Roy O., in Vietnam.

I was grateful so many years later as part of the events surrounding the Norwich Sesquicentennial when the American Veterans Traveling Tribute to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stopped at Howard T. Brown Park, giving me a moment to say thank you and farewell to my friend.

From what I know from long-time residents of Norwich, the city lost twelve young men in the Vietnam War. When I read accounts of that war and its aftermath, I'm angry, bitter, and more than a little guilty at how so many of those who survived were treated, Those fortunate enough to come home returned to us often wounded in places that will never, ever heal and were left to their own devices while the rest of us raced to forget what we never knew enough about in the first place.

Praise we great men and women I know, but the sacrifices made by those with whom we live and love make me wonder if we praise and remember the right people.
-bill kenny