I've been reading this morning some of the tributes left "at The Wall" --- on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund commemorative page --- on the occasion of National Vietnam Veterans Day, marking the anniversary of March 29, 1973, when the last U.S. combat troops left Vietnam. A total of 2.7 million served in that war and 58, 276 died. Many of the survivors suffered irreparable harm.
The Memorial Fund, founded in 1979 by Jan Scruggs, is the non-profit that organized, fund-raised and created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. You will find those tributes here as observances that under other circumstances would be held at The Wall move online.
Here's the message, entitled "Everyone Was Wounded," left by John Dibble, who is chairman of the fund board. Our timelines, but of course not our experiences, are similar. I came back in 1971, too.
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I came back from Vietnam in the summer of 1971. It was several years before anyone asked, or even wanted to know, if I’d been in the war. It was also about that long before I volunteered the information. It was just a matter of practical necessity: you could never be sure how the person you were talking to felt about Vietnam and, by the time you found out, it was usually too late. Most veterans, and I was one of them, didn’t say anything at all.
It was sometime after the fall of Saigon in 1975 that Vietnam, slowly but surely, began to be an acceptable topic of conversation. People began to ask, with what seemed genuine interest, if I had been in the war. But during these conversations, I also began to notice a very peculiar thing. About every third or fourth person would then ask: “Were you wounded?”
I was not, in fact, wounded in Vietnam. Simply a matter of luck, as any veteran will tell you. But I thought it odd that people would, out of nowhere, ask me the question. Just as odd, when I told them I had not been wounded, it usually ended the conversation as far as they were concerned.
When this conversational oddity first began, I didn’t know how to react. At first, I was a bit hurt by the question. Maybe, by not being wounded, I was viewed as not really having been in the war. But the more times I was asked the question and the more I thought about it, the clearer it became that the question really had nothing to do with me.
Keep in mind that these odd conversations took place in settings about as far removed from war as you can imagine — settings like a Midwest university campus or a neighborhood social gathering. There I was, a twentysomething young man who looked like a lot of other twenty-something young men. People, I decided, had a difficult time putting me together with a war that had appeared on their televisions every night for years and had, quite literally, torn this country apart. I decided that the question about whether I had been wounded was spawned by the fact that, for many people, the war so defied understanding that they needed some physical manifestation — a wound — to help them comprehend it.
I think that the people who asked this question never understood that Vietnam wounded more than just the combatants. Of course, by saying that I don’t mean to lessen the tragedy of those who actually suffered physical and mental wounds in Vietnam. Those are the wounds that can’t be hidden and don’t have to be explained. But wars in general, and Vietnam in particular, take their toll in other, less obvious ways.
When I graduated from college in 1968 the draft was in full swing. By graduation day, almost every man in my class had received a notice to report for a pre-induction physical. Of course, we never actually had a graduation day, because the campus was closed down by anti-war demonstrators. A few months later, I reported for duty in the Navy, but some of my classmates never reported to the military at all. Instead, their opposition to the war took them to Canada, or Sweden, or prison. Things were like that in 1968.
While I was in the Navy, campus demonstrations became more frequent and political opposition to Vietnam more vocal. One day in 1970, some ill-guided Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed demonstrators at Kent State University. People all across America were forced to come to grips with the effect the war was having on their children and their nation. By the time I came back from Vietnam in 1971, serious, debilitating wounds had been inflicted on the whole country.
In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated on the Mall in Washington. Like everything else to do with the war, it was controversial. Critics of the Wall derisively called it a “black gash of shame and sorrow”. They were partly right, but not for the reasons they thought. The Wall was, in fact, a wound — the wound that the whole country had suffered. It was the physical manifestation that so many people — people like those that had been asking me the question — had been looking for.
For those of us who were in Vietnam, The Wall was something different. It held the names of friends and comrades who died there. But at that level, a memorial can only exist for those who have participated in the conflict. A truly great memorial — and The Wall is certainly that — must exist at many levels and so minister to those who were wounded in other ways.
People still ask me the question from time to time, although not as often as they did before the Wall. When they used to ask me, I would reply, “No, I was lucky. I wasn’t wounded.” Now I say to those who ask the question: “Everybody was wounded in Vietnam …. everybody.”
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A current project of the Fund is "Wall of Faces," an attempt to locate photographs of all those commemorated on The Wall. You can access that project here --- and search for a name and a face if you like.
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