Vietnam Vets Quietly Labor to Repair War's Damage

I previously wrote in this space about the fundraising effort to build a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Education Center in Washington, D.C. The facility would help to inform future generations about the sacrifices made by the more than 58,000 members of the U.S. military--many of them boomers--who gave their lives in the Vietnam War.

One part of the project is the National Call for Photos, an effort to collect and display photos of all the dead veterans commemorated on the walls of the memorial. As you might imagine, locating pictures of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who have been dead for decades is a daunting task. (The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Fund provides a helpful list of ways to submit photos.)

In addition to these efforts to honor the dead, other Vietnam vets have found ways to honor the living.

At a recent family get-together, for example, I spent time talking to one of my wife's relatives, a social worker from Minnesota who served with the U.S. Marines in Vietnam. Since then, he's been involved with local veterans' organizations and has returned to Vietnam to deliver much-needed items, such as wheelchairs and school supplies. He seems eager to do even more, but when it comes to talking about his motivation, his voice gets quiet. I get the sense, though, that he feels that it's his duty to atone for some of the damage and suffering caused by the war.

Other veterans are doing similar humanitarian work. The most prominent group is The Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, an offshoot of Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA), which has been working for years to clear land mines and improve health care in Vietnam. In July, for example, the foundation partnered with a religious charity to supply wheelchairs and hearing aids for disabled Vietnamese at an orthopedic center in Ninh Binh province. (One grateful wheelchair recipient was a 67-year-old veteran of the North Vietnamese army, who had been paralyzed while fighting the Americans.) Many local chapters of VVA do humanitarian work on their own. Members of a New York City-based chapter, for example, traveled to Vietnam in the fall of 2009 and delivered a half-ton of clothing, shoes, toys and other items to children at four orphanages. (They also paused to hold a memorial service near the spot where U.S. Army Sgt. Howard Querry died in combat in May 1968, after reading letters left by his wife and daughter at the chapter's traveling museum.)

Another such group is Vets With a Mission, a South Carolina-based organization that has built 25 health-care clinics in places such as Da Nang, once the site of the U.S. forces' primary in-country air base. The group also organizes humanitarian missions for doctors and other health-care professionals who donate their services. Future projects include funding a medical and pharmacy school in Hue and building a clinic to provide care for ethnic minorities in Dac Lac province in Vietnam's central highlands.

At a time when there's so much divisiveness in America, we all could learn from these veterans, who have refused to get bogged down in the mud of resentment and prejudice and instead are busy trying to help the Vietnamese--including some of their former adversaries on the battlefield. Some years ago, in a New York Times Magazine article, Vietnam veteran-turned-author Tim O'Brien lamented, "Dear God. We should have bombed these people with love." I can't think of a better way to describe what these heroes are now doing.