Thang Nguyen 555

After more than half a decade, everyone has grown old. But memories of war only seer deeper into the recess of our mind.

Viewed through a veil, a fog even a steel-town window.

The other day, while listening to music in MRI, I could place her voice and face on the album cover (w/ the cat next to the window). Later at home, after googling, I found it’s Carol King.

How quickly we forget names (the visual and audio stay longer). How much more trauma and drama of the past.

Vietnam. A war to remember and to forget. Except for 58,220 names that got a revisit today on the national mall.

Welcome home.

NOK. Next of kin. Knock knock knock. 3 times.

He (played by Christopher Walken in the Deer Hunter) isn’t coming home. He sent money but not himself.

Life goes on. We came, we contained and many did not come back.

“How I wished there had been someone to whom I could say Thank You” courtesy of Graham Green.

I know you were with good hearts. Well-intended deploy with unintended consequences.

Ask not.

If history could be any guide, future generations would think twice about “boots on the ground”. That alone saves lives.

Once I heard an executive talk about his manicurist (Vietnamese) while interviewing me for a sales job.. For some strange reason, I felt a surge of shame, of being somehow put down, albeit not intentionally

How much more when vets got spit on, identified as baby killers or being complicit in an “unjust” war. War of containment of shame and disgust.

In an uncomfortable situation, people tend to cut it short and find the path of least resistance. Out of the window are those ideals and ideas about a peaceful world.

Only frogs boiled in warm water that stay. Most felt the heat – even during Cold War – and jumped out.

It’s been more than half a century. Who profited, who were harmed, who actually enjoyed the killing, destroy to save. George Kennan even denied he actually had pushed his diplomacy theory to the bitter end at the far end of Earth.

It was such an irony that young soldiers listen to California Dreaming while laying around in the jungle of Southeast Asia, among mosquitoes and snakes.

While the song went on about “pretend to pray”…I am sure, in the fox hole, many did not do such a thing. They prayed with all sincerity. Some made it back to eventually show up at the Mall.

The hug and embrace were long overdue. It doesn’t matter where you stood back then. When history called, they came. Even contained. Mysteriously, the Iron Curtain came down, albeit years later. Right in front of our eyes (Berlin Wall).

That’s the kind of destruction that is called for…per Reagan’s request. Vietnam Memorial Wall up, Berlin Wall down. How is that for asymmetry. No more irony.

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey.