I was walking past the VietNam Memorial and there was a middle aged man standing with his head pressed against the Wall. The man was crying. After several seconds, he composed himself, took another look at the name of his loved one, ran his fingers across it, turned and left. Several feet past the man, two children were making a rubbing of a different name on the Wall. I don't know if there is a more powerful and heart wrenching stretch of land in all of Washington.
This past weekend I went to D.C. to see the Yanks play the Nats. The day before the game, I went to see the landmarks around the Capitol. I've seen the monuments before, but I always liked to use the opporunity to tour them as a time to reflect on America, our history, our mistakes, our current course.
One particular scene really struck me. I was walking past the VietNam Memorial and there was a middle aged man standing with his head pressed against the Wall. The man was crying. After several seconds, he composed himself, took another look at the name of his loved one, ran his fingers across it, turned and left. Several feet past the man, two children were making a rubbing of a different name on the Wall. I don't know if there is a more powerful and heart wrenching stretch of land in all of Washington.
The wounds the American people suffered from VietNam, America's first truly overt illegal war, are still fresh. How many others have wept in front of that wall, I wonder? How many families remain broken by our government's misguided grab at power?
From the theory that we must win hearts and minds, to fostering democracy through occupation, to finding ourselves in a quagmire; the paralells between VietNam and Iraq are obvious. Unfortunately, the human toll is becoming as odious as it was in VietNam.
I remember walking past the Wall and getting angry. We have a President who's VietNam experience consisted of "sort of showing up" to an Air National Guard assignment for a couple of years. We have a Vice President who was deferred from serving in 'Nam six times. We have a party in power that saw it as justifiable to denegrate a VietNam vet's war credentials in order to win Bush's relection.
On one hand, there is that famous picture of Kennedy walking alone through the Rose Garden during the Bay of Pigs fiasco. You can see Kennedy grappling with the weight of his decisions. "People are dying, am I doing the right thing?" you can almost hear Kennedy saying. On the other hand, you have W jumping out of a jet cockpit before giving the 'mission accomplished' speech saying gleefully, "I actually flew it!" I truly wonder how many Kennedy-esque moments W has.
It was while walking past the VietNam Memorial that I wished our leaders would step down from on high and take a simple look around. I wished that they would see the heartbreak that is on display daily in front of the Wall. Then maybe, if our leadership had any sort of conscience, they wouldn't have embarked on this Iraq adventure as lightly as they did. Maybe they would've put the common American before their own self interests and chose the road of peace. One can only imagine.