Vietnam War Veteran’s Day at the Wall of Honor

In the 60’s, in a small country in South-East Asia, a war for the hearts and minds of the people was going on; that country was Vietnam. The country was in turmoil from a dictatorial regime, a regime so extreme, that they’d seen Buddhist Monks, torching themselves in the streets, dying in a ball of flame, in protest; while in the United States another, less lethal form of protest was put front and center on our television screens.

People were being executed on public roads; chaos was the name of the game; a game that became a war…a war where the United States of America upped the ante using her best and brightest as cannon fodder against a rising fascist population.

The politicians went all in with America’s future, sinking in quicksand, up their eyeballs in jungles and murky waterways, in a country most Americans couldn’t point to on a map!

The American people had been dealt a “Dead Man’s Hand,” they just didn’t know it yet. Our leaders looked across the poker table at an inscrutable enemy trying not to twitch, looking down at their cards, not making eye contact, trying not to give away that they had a full boat, and in ten years, after killing over fifty-eight thousand Americans, would run the table.

Combat injuries have been a part of every war the United States has fought. Wounds sustained in battle, causing bodily injury to the combatants have been awarded one of America’s most looked up to and prestigious medals, The Purple Heart…which is pridefully, as it should be, part of this memorial place.

There is another kind of injury, sometimes more profound, more devastating, that plagues our warriors coming home from the battlefield; mental injury, injury from what they have seen in the thick of armed conflict, wounds so deep they can live with the veteran for a lifetime. These are injuries that cannot be cured with a magic pill, or a prosthetic, these injuries are often far more devastating. In World War one and two, it was known as “shell shock,” but future wars would know it as Post Traumatic Stress disorder, PTSD.

The returning men and women, confronting the disorder, many in attendance here today, took it head-on, in an attempt to cure the incurable, and rout this hellacious mental illness as they would an enemy combatant, hiding in the jungles of that far-away land… Jungles that would live forever in the minds and hearts of the returning combatants.

The post-Vietnam era, when thousands of soldiers came home to an unadoring public, with no parade to welcome them, only hatred, loathing, and indifference to their sacrifices, both physical and mental… became a place where moral injury and survivors guilt reigned supreme in a counterfeit kingdom within the convolutions of their minds.

Some of these soldiers, like those enshrined, and in attendance here, were able enter society, get jobs, have families, secure “The American Dream.”

Others weren’t so lucky and found themselves without a pot to piss in, on the streets, pan-handling for food and small change, addicted to drugs and alcohol in an effort to erase their lingering memory, the nightmares, survivors guilt, and other consequences of close contact, war.

As was my case, and many of you, we came to the farthest north state of Alaska, where people come for two reasons; to hide, and to bury themselves even deeper, disappear, running from ghosts.

The ghosts of war started to fill the bodies and minds of American troops, willing and unwilling conscripts filled the ranks with boots on the ground in 1963.

The dead and missing from many major battles filled the granite wall on the mall in Washington D.C. to overflowing, as it wound its way like a Python amongst other American monuments to her fallen war heroes. A granite marker with the names of men and women, listed as KIA, killed in action, or MIA, missing in action presumed dead was the parade America gave to her returning warriors.

In 1965 the Battle of Ia Drang, in 1968, the Tet Offensive, the Battle of Khe Sanh, the Battle of Hue, and Hamburger Hill, took thousands of American patriots home; their war, and their lives, over.

While the war in Vietnam ended in 1975, veteran assistance and medical centers in the far north were not in place; that came later in 1992. A seventeen-year hiatus for those unlucky enough to come home whole, to dig themselves a grave, a headstone with no name inscribed, from which they would remain, forever anonymous; no name cast in granite, no parade welcoming them home as heroes, cast out with the trash of history.

This place is special, located in the farthest north part of the United States, a monument to the survivors on this Vietnam Veterans Day. Those inscribed on this wall and those in attendance have come here today to honor the participants and their families, many who moved north after the war to become ghosts; anonymity in a wonderous land, with hopes for a brighter future and eventual repose in a place that honored their service.

I thank all those responsible for this parade, God Bless You, God Bless those that have gone before us, and God Bless the United States of America.