I am a few years too young to have had to stare the Vietnam War itself in the eye, but I've met plenty of other boomers who weren't so lucky.
Years ago, I sat in a folding chair at a local Veterans Administration help center in Pittsburgh and listened to a former Marine named Arto Woods tell me about the spring night in 1968 outside Hue when a Viet Cong B40 rocket-propelled grenade nearly ended his life. He found himself lying in the elephant grass, watching the blood flow from his wounded leg, yelling to his buddies not to come and get him because they would be easy targets for the enemy. Then Wood heard the grass rustle. He cocked his .45, figuring that he might take down one of his attackers before they killed him. Instead, he heard another frantic voice. "Woods! Woods! Yankee Doodle!" the voice cried out, using the words they identified themselves with in the heat of battle. Woods' comrade dragged him away. All the while, oddly, he stayed impassive, totally cool. As I wrote back in 1981:
"I had this real macho superman mentality," he says. "I just couldn't believe that there was a bullet that could kill me, that I could die." When he finally got back to safety, he realized the truth and cried like a child.
It's been a long time since I spoke to Arto Woods, who today is a Veterans Administration official, and I'm sure he wouldn't remember our brief conversation. But I still think about him whenever I go to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, which contains the names of the 58,267 Americans, many of them boomers, who met the fate that he narrowly escaped.
I go there to look at the names on the wall but always end up gazing at the other visitors. Some wear baseball caps, jacket patches or t-shirts emblazoned with the name of some military unit. Often, they've got a couple of teenagers or grade-school-aged children trailing behind, laden with souvenirs from the Air and Space Museum gift shop. The kids steal glances at the sidewalk vendors selling ice cream and try to humor the older folks, who for some reason really, really wanted to come over and walk through the gauntlet of these stark black walls. Then the older folks stop suddenly, stare at the wall, and point. "There he is," they'll say to the kids, introducing them to an uncle or granddad or high school friend, the one who never had the chance to listen to classic rock or wear Dockers, or go to the next generation's weddings and high school graduations, who never got a chance to get together with his old Army buddies and drink a little too much and laugh and maybe shed a tear about the innocence that they all lost.
I always try to imagine that lost grandfather or uncle or high school friend, but the walls offer only their names. So if you don't have a personal connection to them, you can only imagine who they were, or what actually happened to them, or the lives they might have lived had they not been snatched away so prematurely.
That's why I was excited to read Washington Post sports columnist Mike Wise's column on Friday about Peter Holt, owner of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, who four decades ago was one of the few offspring of wealthy families (former Vice President Al Gore was another) to serve in the Vietnam War. Holt recently donated $1 million to the effort to build a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Education Center, which would contain photos of all the casualties commemorated on the memorial. It would also offer a display of the more than 100,000 items that people have left behind in memorial at the VVM--boots, dog tags, old letters, stuffed animals, poems scrawled on hotel stationery, and the like.
The center, like the memorial itself, will be built entirely with private, nongovernment funding. Organizers need $85 million, which gives them about $65 million more to raise. If you think this sounds like a great idea--and I do--here's where you can donate online.