Names ...

EIGHT HUNDRED AND FIFTY-THREE NAMES have power, punched alphabetically into slabs of black granite; more power when read mindfully, one by one.

Sun-baked Sunday before Decoration Day and early. We brought beer, cigarettes and roses; combat veteran and Saigon warrior (me), odd couple, old and scruffy by dawn’s early light.

This was Des Moines, down a path southeast of the Capitol at the Iowa Vietnam memorial, a curved shadow of that big Wall in D.C. with 58,249 names on it. A small ritual, nothing special, and why this year I'm not sure.

Already under the names when we got there: Peonies with stems wrapped in a damp cloth and tied up with string. Somebody's mother had been there, maybe.

A FEW DAYS LATER and sitting around up here with other folks and talking about military plans to teach combat ethics to troops now that word of an apparent massacre of Iraqi civilians by U.S. Marines in Haditha is getting around.

“Teaching killers ethics?” one guy asks. A slip of the tongue I suppose.

A COMMON DENOMINATOR that links all veterans of all wars is a need to justify --- to make sense of it, to explain what was seen and done, to fit it into something bigger. For some of us, it’s just one of those exercises life imposes. For others, sanity depends on it. Most work on it quietly, never say a thing.

It’s been hard to justify Vietnam, but for years I thought I had it down pretty good. We bought time and life for millions of younger ones, ended the draft, fixed it so they didn’t have to live with war, so they could be self-indulgent and shop. You wondered sometimes if they were worth it --- and still do --- but that’s just getting old.

SEPTEMBER 11 and Afghanistan come along. No huge problem there. Afghanistan had to be done you tell yourself.

Then Iraq, and you begin to think those good old boys and girls in Washington might be forgetting a few things and you begin to wonder.

Don’t start a war unless you’re 99 percent sure you can finish it; never underestimate the enemy; don’t plow into cultures you don’t understand if you can avoid it; never lose sight of what combat will do to the youngsters you send into it.

And that most inconvenient of the new commandments, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as theyself."

Now that alleged massacre in Haditha.

Well what did you expect? Forget My Lai? It was much bigger, much worse. But this is the same chapter, just a different verse.

I DON'T WATCH much TV, but happened to see a Monday night special on PBS: "American Experience: Two Days in October" that juxtaposed 17 October 1967, the day 64 of 142 U.S. troops died in a Viet Cong ambush in Vietnam, with 18 October 1967, the day police responded with extreme brutality to a large anti-war protest on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Anybody else remember that, when America was so badly divided over the Vietnam War that we had a war within a war back home?

You can argue till kingdom come about that one, too, but one result was undeniable: the total disconnect between the soldiers in Vietnam and many of the folks back home they’d been told they were fighting for.

Friends of mine got off planes in the U.S., frazzled and worn out, and were taunted. One guy I knew, escorting the body of a KIA buddy home to Missouri, was spit on. Hadn’t done a thing to deserve it.

I'M AFRAID it’s going to happen again. That’s why “teaching killers ethics?” scared me. I think this war will end the way Vietnam did; declare victory and walk away. That this is the way many will start to think about our soldiers, Marines, corpsmen, airmen.

They’re talking about a new memorial, maybe out at the new veterans’ cemetery near Van Meter, for Iowa’s dead from Afghanistan and Iraq. Forty-one now, I think; but many more scarred mentally, pieces blown away.

I’m scared about how many names will be on that memorial before everything’s said and done. Scared for those whose names won’t be there.

I’m scared we’ll forget that the fingers that pulled those triggers in Iraq were extensions of ours, that they were us.

I’m scared that when we scramble to find someone else to blame for this war that we’ll betray another generation of the young, those we’ve been calling heroes (they would not call themselves that, you know; it's just our way of making ourselves feel better). Then turn away.

JUSTIFICATION. I didn't have it worked out that well after all. But there’s something else, and my buddy could tell you more about it than I can because he lived it.

Those politicians, Memorial Day orators and others will tell you those kids died for freedom. But if you get right down to it, in the blood and guts of a war zone, they live, fight and die for each other.

How does the Good Book put it? "Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

If you don’t get that, try this: They die for your sins, and mine; did it then, do it now --- day after bloody day.