Vietnam Veteran on His Homecoming and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

I went to Vietnam in September 1967 as a twenty-one-year-old Army helicopter pilot, warrant officer.

I flew in combat for thirteen months, Big Tet, Little Tet.

You all write-- remember that in your history books.

When I came back and went on to my next posting, which was in Germany, and finally came back to the US in May 1970.

Well, some of you were old enough, most of you don't look like it .

May 1970 was not a hospitable time for a Vietnam vet in America.

Now, I didn't experience directly any abuse other than the sort of quiet avoidance, the polite dismissal of you as a inconvenient reminder of a war that was fading from, uh, popularity and they wanted it to fade from the mind.

So like all-- most of my buddies, I put my head down, plowed forward, trying to leave Vietnam behind.

Uh, went year-round through university, took the Foreign Service exam, came in, and I had a thirty-four-year career.

But when I came ba-- uh, back from my first posting in Moscow, it was in the State Department, and I attended the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

And I had some of my, uh, Vietnam flight school buddies who came down to join me, and I can't tell you how emotional it was, emotionally cathartic for some of them who were carrying, carrying that memory and that burden,

and they had been basically ignored and dismissed.

You're inconvenient. You know, go away. Uh, get on with life. Uh, I would then walk over from the Vietnam Memorial to the Lincoln Memorial and look up across Memorial Bridge at Arlington House and Arlington National Cemetery.

God, by then I'm in my late thirties.

And I would feel the hurt, the anger, the pain, the trauma to begin to recede.

That's why this means so much.

And I have a duty as a Vietnam vet, as a, as a survivor to my buddies buried there to honor their sacrifice and protect their memory from this vainglorious monument.

This is not just, I'm sorry, another park.

This is something more profoundly important and incomparably different.

And we have to remember that, respect it, honor it, protect it.

Thank you.