Vietnam Memorial

When we went to Washington, D.C., for the Manchester United-Barcelona match, we spent part of Saturday touring some of the memorials around the Mall. I finally got to see the Vietnam Memorial, to me the most moving, the most touching of the war memorials.

For one thing, this was "our" war. In many ways it defined my generation. It was the defining action of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, a presidency that should have been remembered for desegregation and efforts to combat poverty. The ignominious end of the war should have been the defining moment for the Nixon presidency but his later lunacy upstaged even that.

Partly the Vietnam memorial is the most moving, the most intense because it is the most personal. You cannot escape it. You cannot look away. All those names. Somewhere on that wally there is the name of someone you knew. A friend. A relative. A classmate. Those are real people. Other memorials with their statues, no matter how realistic the statues, are abstractions, representations. There is nothing abstract about the Vietnam memorial. These are the names of real sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters whose deaths left a hole in real families. The Wall never lets us forget that.



And The Wall never lets us escape our own responsibility, our own culpability, for the war. Our own faces reflected amongst the names of the dead in the polished marble surface puts us in the middle of the tragedy. Regardless of which side you were on - against it or for it - we were all part of the horror. We are all responsible for those names on the wall. There is no "us" and "them." There is only us.

Somehow we haven't seemed to learn that lesson. The horror continues only now it's in the desert instead of the jungle. And we are all still responsible.