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The Unseen Wall

By Pat Finnegan

NATIONAL SALUTE TO VIETNAM VETERANS
MEMORIES AND MESSAGES

Dewey Ruis, Larry Pypinowski,, Bob Moinester, Jerry Sorrentino, Dennis Finnegan; all young men, all in the prime of their lives, all dead. Three enlisted men, two officers, three of them never saw their 20th birthday, one made it into his twenties, one almost made it out of his twenties. Two were friends from my boyhood days, one a brother of shared bloodlines, two were brothers of many humps, smokes, jokes, cups of cocoa, and terrified moments together. Four army, one navy, four had enlisted, one was drafted, three paratroopers, one regular infantry, one navy riverboats. Four dead from fatal gunshot wounds, one dead in the flaming wreckage of a helicopter. Four of them had never married, one of them left a wife and two daughters. Three from New York, one from Georgia, one from New Jersey. Two killed in 1968, two killed in 1969, one killed in 1972; four were on their first tour, one was on his fourth.

For the rest of my life I will remember these friends and brothers of mine; them and the others that time has left only their faces and nicknames behind.

Their names are now etched in our nation's capital for a long as granite exists. Their names are there among all the other Deweys from Georgia, all the other Ski's from Jersey, all the other Bob's and Jerrys and Dennis's from New York, and the Jims from Texas, and Reds from California, and Chiefs from Montana and Docs from Puerto Rico. They are there all these sons and daughters of little and big town America, for America to see.

What America doesn't see is the mothers and fathers who fainted when the opened their doors to see a uniformed military officer and their local religious leader standing there with practiced looks of sorrow and compassion. What American doesn't see is the young wife, four months pregnant, who miscarries with the news that her 19-year-old husband is dead. What American doesn't see if the grandparents with weak hearts who yield themselves to death because the joy of the old age has been blown to pieces 11,000 miles away. What American doesn't see is the infants and young children, just starting to realize who the person with the deeper voice and stronger hands was, infants and children who now have only fast-diminishing memories. What America doesn't see is the family days in the park, gatherings for birthday, Thanksgivings, Christmas, hopes dreams and ambitions that now will never be. What America doesn't see is the surviving families who now dread the unspoken words and melancholy which surrounds their holidays. And what America doesn't see is the 57,939 shrines of pictures and medals in houses and apartments from Maine to Hawaii, Alaska to Puerto Rico, Chicago to New Orleans.

What America does and will see is the 57,939 names now engraved in our national memory. What America doesn't see is that number and more dead since their return from Vietnam. What America doesn't see is that number of veterans and more that are now unemployed, drug addicted, alcoholic, incarcerated, confused and alienated. What America doesn't see is the hundreds of thousands wounded in Vietnam, men now without arms, eyes, spleens, kidneys, etc. What America doesn't see is the thousands of veterans and their children suffering from the effects of exposure to "one of the most toxic substances known to man." What America doesn't see is the 115,878 mothers, fathers, the 231,756 grandparents, the uncounted brothers, sisters, daughters, sons, friends and lovers.

Oh yes, the number of Americans permanently affected by our many-year military commitment to the Southeast Asian War goes far beyond the 57,939 names that have been immortalized. If all the names of the Americans who suffer from that war were inscribed, the 10-foot blocks of granite would surround Washington DC. And that sounds like an exceptionally fine idea.

There is not the name of one, not one son or daughter of any Congressmen of Senator who held office during the Vietnam way years, to be seen on the monument. Over 1500 of their children were draft eligible during the Vietnam War. Twenty-seven of that number went into uniform, 3 went to Vietnam, one was wounded. The children of the people who voted for the war, voted funds for its continuation year after year have a service rate of 1.8% compared to 34.6% of the same age groups in the general population. Their service in Vietnam rate (once they got into the service) was 11.1% as opposed to 33.3% for the rest of us. If we were all called to serve in the same proportions as the children of the war makers, we would need no monument for none of us would have died and only 468,000 instead of over 7,000 would have been in uniform with only 52,000 instead of 3,000,000 serving in Vietnam. It is easy to perceive a blood-bath as a "just and noble cause" when you and yours are not being asked to battle in the blood. A wall around Washington, DC sounds real good. The next time they want to have a war, they can have it among themselves and leave the rest of us out of it. We paid our dues many times over; they refuse to even turn the check over to see what their bill is.

If we put the names of all the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians affected on a monument we would have a wall a 100 feet high around the entire nation. If we do not as a nation examine, criticize and learn from those terrible years and from there move in a direction of peaceful co-existence with the other nations of the world, that 100 foot wall should go up with a steel top to it to ensure that the sickness that caused the sacrilege of the Vietnam war is not allowed to run amok in the world again.

As Americans we pride ourselves on our wars, always to the extent of being unaware of how much the rest of the world suffers in these wars. America has not had one bomb, one shell or even one bullet cause wartime damage since 1865, while the rest of the world has crawled out of the rubble of war many, many times. There is only the one planet and 4,000,000,000 of us must live on it, or the chances are that all 4 billion of us will die horribly with it.

Pat Finnegan
Albany, NY