Editorial

VIETNAM MEMORIAL WALL PROMPTS THOUGHTS ABOUT THE FUTURE

This article comes from our electronic archive and has not been reviewed. It may contain glitches.

I went to see the Vietnam Memorial Wall. I had to go. I don't much think I wanted to, but I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

Vietnam was a war that most of us would like to forget. We have the sneaking suspicion in the backs of our minds that we were somehow responsible and that seeing the wall might prove it.

Vietnam was a political war. It was a war of small political leaders with large egos. It was not a war that had to be won. It was not even a war that had to be fought. We would like to write "Finished" on it and set it on the shelf with all our other wars. We would like to let it fade ever deeper into the lengthening shadows of time where memory and conscience seldom go.

It has been a while now, and already we have a new generation on whose tongue the names Saigon and Vietnam are as foreign as Iwo Jima and Corregidor were on mine. We will let it go in time, when all that's left is a monument to the dead and perhaps some fading photographs on the mantel and some medals in the back of a dresser drawer.

I stood for a long while and read the names on the wall. I didn't read them all, of course, I didn't know any of them, so it didn't matter which ones I read. In my heart, I knew them all.

After I read each name, I paused briefly and tried to imagine what that young man was like. Was he short? Was he tall? Was he black? Was he white? Was he Indian? Was he Eskimo? Was he one of a hundred things that make us what we are? I couldn't tell.

They were Americans. And they were ours. They were sons of us all, and they were boys. Just boys.

Politicians like to refer to the dead and missing as warriors, defenders of freedom, fallen heroes. It makes their dying seem more professional in a detached sort of way.

We should have seized our self-proclaimed public servants by the scruff of the neck, shook them until their teeth rattled like rocks in a tin can and demanded, "Where are our kids? Find them and bring them home." When we collectively failed to seize the moment, they gave us instead the wall of the dead with 58,000 names upon it, and the certain knowledge that somewhere in the fields of Asia lie the bones of boys, our boys, who are never coming home again.

The legions of the dead have always marched into history with assurances from the living that "They shall not have died in vain." There is a growing suspicion that they have taken a hallowed phrase and made it hollow.

They were heroes, of course some of the best this country has ever produced. We sent them to a war that we asked them to fight. We sent them into a battle that we would not let them win, and we asked them to die trying. We asked them to fight a war with nothing at stake, nothing to win, nothing to lose, and to do it under the mantle of freedom, God and country. They accepted the challenge because we asked them to, and they paid the ultimate price a soldier can pay. If any one of them died in vain, then the shame is ours. They were not the players, but the pawns, just victims of the games people play.

The legacy they left may not be in battles won and lost, but in the names carved in granite. What a tribute it would be to them if we would resolve to go from this point forward not as tall or short or thick or thin or this or that, but as Americans, like the names on a black granite wall.

Bill Neel is a resident of Sikeston.