This week is the 25th anniversaries of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial in D.C. The memorial is build to honor the brave men and women who have scarified for the country, and also to convey to the next generation a sense of history. We who have lived through that period of time knew very well the chaos that an unpopular war will bring, a war with no public supports is in no way winnable. Military means is not the only solution; despite all this history, this administration still insists on this path for destruction. We might as well have another contest for construction of "the new memorial".
From Newsweek,
Critics claimed the gentle V where its two long walls met was a coded peace sign; what Lin called "a rift in the earth" one brigadier general termed "a scar of shame." Some vets hated it
The truth about this is that everyone find their own meanings from this simplistic design, as Robert Campbell "An Emotive Place Apart," says ..
"As you descend the path along the wall and reach this angle, you realize that one wing of the black wall points straight at the tall, white Washington Monument a mile or so off, and the other at the Lincoln Memorial, visible through a screen of trees about 600 feet away. In making this descent you feel you're entering a cloistered space, set off from the busy surroundings. Streets and skylines disappear to leave you alone with the wall and its names. Then, as you pass the angle and begin to climb, you feel yourself emerging again into the world of noise and light after a meditative experience.
"At close range, the names dominate everything. . . . The name of the first soldier who died is carved at the angle in the wall, and the names continue to the right in columns in chronological order of date of death, out to the east end where the wall fades into the earth. The names begin again, with the next soldier who died, at the west end, where the wall emerges from the earth...."
It is a "meditative experience", I wonder if our so called "leaders" have ever ventured to this memorial and reflects on what all these names on the wall mean. War is not an adventure, people lives are at stake.
The creator of the memorial, Maya Lin says ..
"I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it."
Let's hope, if this wound can be healed, too many people have died already. The surge serves no purpose only to have more people get killed. The tunnel vision of this administration on Iraq is astonishing. It seems military mean is the only course of action, and it had proven for the last 4 years that it does not and will not work. May be a complete withdrawal is a better solution, just look at the history of Vietnam War.