It being Memorial Day, I wondered who among the Vietnam War dead I might know. Using my home town as a filter turned up four names I did not know; using the state of Washington as a filter turned up 1,047 names I did not know.
But I could easily have known any of them given that they came from nearby and would be roughly my age had they survived. They all died in their prime and shared a decade in death – the 1960s. I survived the 1960s through a combination of fate, luck and determination, but none of them did. In the case of their war, they fought at their country’s request for a questionable national benefit. But each of them died in the service of his country nonetheless, so I salute these strangers by name for their patriotism and the fact that they were my companions in residency sharing the same circumstances of my youth.
There are far more armed services related dead from the state of Washington than the dead of Vietnam. I salute all of them as well today, just as I do those dead veterans from elsewhere. But with one exception, it is these 1,047 who are mostly on my mind on this official Memorial Day for I could easily have been a member of their class. Reading each of their names this morning reminded me of the aggregate cost of lost futures that patriotism often demands.
As always, my deepest thoughts on this or any other day, official or otherwise, lie with the resident of Grave 450, Section 76 of Arlington National Cemetery – my partner, mentor and friend, Robert Lincoln Weiss. He died long after the war in which he fought – World War II – a war that stayed fresh in his memory until the day he died in 2016 at age 92. Knowing well the anguish he suffered over his lost comrades, I take the opportunity to salute all of our living veterans on this day of remembrance as well. From my conversations with Bob about World War II, l know that each living combat veteran celebrates his or her dead comrades by name and particular history in everyday memory just as Bob did on every single day of his post-war life.
Combat veterans don’t require an official day to celebrate our nation’s dead as the rest of us do; their dead survive in bright memory as well as on the sanitized, formal written lists which the rest of us must depend upon instead.
