VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL: The Black Wall That Cuts Many of our Lives In Half
Written: Apr 17 '01 (Updated Apr 18 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A place to remember.
Cons: None.
The Bottom Line: Go there and find what happened to the dream. And perhaps, you will find a bit of healing.
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| Ed.Williamson's Full Review: Vietnam Veterans Memorial |
Bobby.
Bobby was like Rex and Johnny and fifty thousand others, not to mention hundreds of thousands on the other side. Young men and women born in the years after World War II, Boomers all, sent off to Southeast Asia to a place far from reality as they knew it, where their own reality was cut down into nothingness by a bullet or a bomb or a wall of flame.
The Vietnam War. The messy war. The television war. The war of protest. The war of no clear lines. The war of no clear strategies. The war of no true heroes. The war of darkness, confusion, and broken dreams. The war of "friendly fire." The war of "Air America." The war where America shed its deepest tears since the Civil War a hundred years earlier. And now there was his name on the black wall in Washington. Bobby.
I remembered the night when we were on the school trip together with the others. We were in a hotel room and it was late and we were playing cards. I can still remember his grinning face, his laugh, like a snapshot forever etched in my mind. Bobby. Reddish hair and freckles. Laughing his head off, his face full of boyhood fun. Bobby. Laughing and joking and carrying on as the night wore on. My friend. Bobby.
Flash forward to a day a couple of years later. Bobby, standing tall and proud in his dark green uniform, looking like...someone else, someone he had become...a soldier. The smile was still there, the laugh, but now he was...serious. Ramrod posture, game-face. He had a mission before him. A war.
Flash forward a few months later. A long box on the ground in front of us draped in an American flag. KIA, they said..."Killed In Action"..... Bobby.
They laid him down into the ground, taking with him that smile and that laugh and that memory of the night in the hotel and the card game and the endless talk late into the night of dreams of what might have been.
Flash forward a few years later. I'm standing at the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial with my sons and my daughter. And there his name is in the ebony stone: ROBERT....
No, I thought. Not "Robert." We never called him Robert. He was always...Bobby. Now all that is left of him here is this...this name etched into stone...this long black line symbolizing a war that split our lives and our dreams in half, like a cleaver cleaving a generation of us all.
Before it, we were at one with the sun and the Ozzie and Harriet existence and the Beach Boys and drag racing and the Beatles and the Prom nights and the football games on Friday nights and all that went with that all too innocent world. Then came the war.
After that we were the drugged-out, smashed-up, shock-rocked
generation of rebels and countercuturalists and dust in the wind. We were the veterans who no one knew quite what to do with. The wall did it. Or rather, the War...behind that wall.
And yet...if we will ever find our way back to the garden, it must be, in a way, straight through that wall. If you go there and you touch it and you see the names and you remember, you will know and will feel something deep inside. Every name there represents a dream. Every one of those men and women wanted something good to happen. And the question is...did they die in vain? Did we lose...the dream?
Not long ago there was a movie whose refrain, over and over, was "Strength and Honor". Those whose names are upon the wall believed in strength and honor and light for a dream for the future for us all. And do you know what? It's still there. It's still there.
But it helps to go there to Washington, D.C. and go down there where the Memorial is and to just...touch the wall, and to touch the names.
In a way, it connects you to them, and though they are long dead, you know they are never really dead as long as their dream is still alive. And their dream is our dream. And we can pass on our dream to those who follow us.
Ironic as it seems, that dream now encompasses the children on the other side now too. The men and women who fought against us in the rice paddies of Viet Nam are no longer the enemy. They, too, can be in on the dream. They, too, are people, brothers and sisters, in a new world now, our world together. The war is long past.
Strength and honor, and freedom. Stand beside that wall someday. Look at the names. Remember the price they paid. Remember their dream.
And keep their dream on fire, like an eternal flame, always. They would want that. I know this: Bobby would. I can see him smiling at me, even now. And we, who must remain, can go on, can give it, all the same.
*****
Recommended:
Yes
Best Suited For: Friends
Best Time to Travel Here: Jun - Aug
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Epinions.com ID:
Ed.Williamson
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Member: Ed Williamson
Location: Way Out West, USA
Reviews written: 570
Trusted by: 295 members
About Me:
The weak fall back on the literal; the strong, on ways of the spirit.
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