memorial day always appends a weekend. it is the last monday in may when america, expectant in the rejuvenation of another summer, comes together and remembers its war dead. men and women who have fallen in crusades for causes just, or otherwise; futile or foolhardy.
war fragments the soul of a nation. principled or immoral, it shames the moral DNA from which a nation believes it has gestated. in america, more than most, war usurps a professed code of behavior that implies a virtuous high ground. america has always been the self-anointed crusader against tyranny and perceived evil.
war fragments the soul of a nation. principled or immoral, it shames the moral DNA from which a nation believes it has gestated. in america, more than most, war usurps a professed code of behavior that implies a virtuous high ground. america has always been the self-anointed crusader against tyranny and perceived evil.
vietnam was, peripherally, the war of my generation. i skirted the boundary fences of this era as it tore america asunder. a war, that in many ways, made for a new and emerging america. the vietnam war was like a swivel stick, stirring an already volatile cocktail filled with the ingredients of social wrath, racial inequity, sexual emancipation and gender fury.
it was the war that influenced my age, the music i listened to, the politics i believed in; it became the barometer by which future wars were gauged. it was the first direct media-managed war, watched on TV screens in the safety of living rooms across america, almost live as it happened. it was the war which outraged our senses and blunted our empathy.
young men died and, for a time, remained forgotten as a nation wrestled in denial with its self induced tryst with an ideological war not won.
the national mall in washington DC is a veritable map of american history, mythology, symbolism and power. it also has spaces earmarked in dedication to those who have fallen in america’s multiple foreign crusades.
these are solemn spaces, neither trivial nor caricatured, capturing the essence of great conflicts framed by the history of those times: the great war to end all wars; the war of the pacific and that against hitler; the korean war; and yes, finally, a monument to those young (mostly) men who were carried away to the jungles of southeast asia never to return.
even with the wisdom and hindsight of its abortive tweak at history, i respect a nation that can come back and honor its fallen youth. the pain of vietnam may have receded in the minds of many. but the almost 60,0000 names etched on the cold, reflective, black granite walls sunk into to the earth are real, and dead. they are visited today by fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and lovers tormented by the wasted promise of a generation.
in the bright sunshine of a warm mid-spring afternoon, it was a haunting and captivating moment of truth.
perhaps, one day, there will also be a memorial to the victims of the cold war; and to the unnamed and innocent fatalities of the unwelcome consequences of terror.
photographs: the vietnam veterans memorial, the national mall, washington DC, may 2010.
