School is underway and I survived the senior class trip to Washington D.C. Being from a place like Iowa, there seems to be a strange compulsion to speak to other people you think may also be from Iowa. One evening we dropped the students off at the Lincoln Memorial with a map which showed the locations of the other memorials. They were to meet the bus in two hours at the Jefferson Memorial. It is somewhat surprising how many get lost between the two locations but we did manage to collect all of them before heading back to the hotel.
I was curious to see how the kids reacted to seeing the Vietnam Memorial, plus I was tired, so I sat on a bench where I could see them as they walked towards the giant tombstone. Most of the kids seemed to be sobered by the site and walked slowly by the names.
In the meantime there were quite a few old guys going by. Some were in wheel chairs, many had canes, but they were all wearing yellow t-shirts which said something about being WWII vets. Most had name tags which indicated they were from Iowa. One of the old guys sat at the other end of the bench I was on and asked if I was from DC. I told him I was from Iowa with a group of school kids. I asked where he was from and he said Altoona, in central Iowa. I told him I was from the Kalona area and he said he remembered playing them in basketball when he was in high school. He remembered there were three Gingerich's on the Kalona team, and three Kemp's on the Conesville team he played for. I asked where he served in WWII and he rattled off the names of several islands including Okinawa. I mentioned that from what I had read, Okinawa experienced some major battles. His response was "it was ugly, there was nothing good about it." He was part of group of Iowa veterans, Hy-Vee took to DC for a day to see the WWII monument (before they die).
After WWII he made a career out of the Marines. He served in Korea and then trained men going through basic training on their way to Vietnam. He said he hated reading Leatherneck magazine every month because they listed all the Marines killed the previous month and "it tore me up when I saw a kid I had trained."
He had three names he wanted to find on the wall, one he had named his son after, the other he described as his best friend. He knew which panels to look for but was having a little trouble, so I tagged along and helped him find the names. He kept repeating, "its a shame these men died." When we found the names he cried and after the last one, his best friend, he walked away.
I've been reading David Halberstam's "The Best and the Brightest" and didn't have the heart to tell the old guy that he was right - it was a shame 70,000 US men had to die in Vietnam, let alone the 2 million plus Vietnamese thought to have been killed. Halberstam describes what happens when men who think they are smarter than everyone else, and have no sense of humility or history, try to run a war. It is sad story full of misperceptions, mistakes, arrogance and foolishness. In my understanding McNamara's book confirms much of Halberstam's analysis. It was a war which didn't need to happen and shouldn't have happened.
When I walked back, I noticed the old guy was sitting on the bench so I stopped and thanked him for letting me tag along. He wished me well, and said, "tell those kids you're teaching, that this isn't worth it. I wish they'd never have to build another one of these." Its too bad we are probably well on our way to doing so. And its tragic that so many people still look at war as a glorious thing.
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