Did you know anyone like Dennis? He died in Nam age 19

[Omaha Steve]

Dennis lived a few blocks from my home. He was the (older) brother I never had. I remember seeing him in his uniform before he shipped out. I think it was 1967. I never saw him again. His mom learned on the nightly news that his camp and bunker were over run in a night fight. She knew. I learned the next day.

I was watching a Billy Joel video just now. It had photos of soldiers in Nam. Every so often my mind goes back in time. Long forgotten memories come to the surface. I had a good cry.

Forty of more years down the road, somebody currently very young will have a memory of our guys and gals lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. I know just how they are going to feel.

When the traveling Wall that Heals comes to Omaha, I go and think of Dennis.

Give Peace a Chance!

[femmocrat]

1. I think most people of our generation knew "someone like Dennis".

I have been to the Wall in DC and the traveling Wall when it came here. I always cry like VN was only yesterday.

Those wounds have not healed. :hug:

[SheilaT]

2. I'm reminded of the song

No Man's Land by Eric Bogle:



Well how d'you do Private William MacBride
Do you mind if I sit here down by your graveside
I'll rest for a while in the warm summer sun
I've been walking all day and I'm nearly done
I can see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the glorious fallen in nineteen-sixteen
Well I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or Willie MacBride was it slow and obscene

Chorus:
Did they beat the drums slowly
Did they sound the fife lowly
Did the rifles fire o'er you
As they lowered you down
Did the bugles sing the Last Post and Chorus
Did the pipes play The Flowers of the Forest

Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some loyal heart is your memory enshrined
And though you died back in nineteen-sixteen
To that loyal heart are you always nineteen
Or are you a stranger without even a name
Forever enshrined behind some glass pane
In an old photograph torn and tattered and stained
And fading to yellow in a brown leather frame

The sun's shining now on these green fields of France
The warm wind blows gently and the red poppies dance
The trenches have vanished long under the plough
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now
But here in this graveyard it's still no man's land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man
And a whole generation that were butchered and damned

And I can't help but wonder now Willie MacBride
Do all those who lie here know why they died
Did you really believe them when they told you the cause
Did you really believe that this war would end wars
Well the suffering the sorrow the glory the shame
The killing the dying it was all done in vain
For Willie MacBride it all happened again
And again and again and again and again

[WheelWalker]

4. And for me, this...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTtVTNTfg80

[AnArmyVeteran]

7. I like Country Joe & the Fish song 'Vietnam'. Gimmie an F... a U... a C... a K...

What's that spell...

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. My dear Omaha Steve...

The only person I knew in Viet Nam was my brother, and he returned alive and as well as could be expected.

I've seen the Wall in DC and it is something else...

Yes...give peace a chance!

It seems we all want that.....all but the folks who live in the Pentagon.

And they're the ones with the President's ear...


Recommended.

[grasswire]

5. I remember when some of us on the Internets were investigating the Bush...

...AWOL matter in 1999 and 2000. I was trying to find out who might have gone to Vietnam in George's place while he was jumped out of that draft and sent to the Texas Air National Guard. It would have likely been a person with darker skin, and less money and power -- someone from Midland TX. In that research, I read so many sad sad tales. One that particularly struck me was of a young man killed in a rice paddy on his first day in country. Damn. Such a huge huge waste. And for what?

War. What is it good for?

[TBF]

6. Recommended. nt

[Blue_In_AK]

8. Yes, my little cousin, David,

who was also just barely 19 when he died in Nam ... two months after arriving.

[dipsydoodle]

9. 19

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3LdMAqUMnM

[marzipanni]

10. In ninth grade in my art class I overheard an older boy telling his friend

about his brother who had joined the navy. His brother was very distraught because his job was to lean out of a boat and snag bodies from the river.
Over the years I wondered if that young man made it back.
I googled the name of that guy fron my art class and found that he's an artist, and fortunately his brother's name isn't on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.
http://thewall-usa.com/index.asp#search

[Chemical Bill]

11. A kid I knew in elementary school had a model plane.

It was the coolest model. He told me that his father flew one in Vietnam. But there was a sadness in his eyes, a lack of enthusiasm in his voice. His father was MIA, he knew his father was missing. I've seen his father's name on the traveling wall. I bet he would have given up that cool model to get his father back.

Bill

[NEOhiodemocrat]

12. My friend Tom

died in 1969, he was 20. A Point man in Viet Nam. My husband's good friend Ed died in 1966. Whenever I go to DC I look at their names and remember. If we had the body count on the news like it was back then would it make a difference? This war seems invisible to me sometime, I am sure that is the way the media wants it. So sad....

[petersjo02]

13. Remembering

Herbie Zinnel and Dennis Marcellus from my hometown in Iowa. Dennis actually killed himself after he came home, but he is every bit as much of a victim of that war as Herbie was.

[madokie]

14. The base I spent 15 months at was over run by the VC a couple weeks after I left

still to this day I can't go see the wall for fear of seeing the names of my friends there who may be on there. I don't think I can handle it even after the forty years its been. I want to remember them as living not as names on the wall as it won't do either of us any good no matter. Sorry but I haven't come to grips with my time there and doubt that I ever will. War is an admission of failure and nothing more. If the people who made the decisions to go to war were the ones who fought them you can bet your ass there would be no wars fought.

[pinboy3niner]

19. This thread turned out to be more emotional for me than I expected

I lost way too many friends there, including some I didn't find out about for many years.

On one visit to the Wall I decided to check on the name of someone I'd roomed with for three months in training. I didn't expect to find the name, but it was there. And it was only when I visited his panel that the memory came back of the day, 17 years earlier in VN, when I'd been told of his death. Just one of so many memories I'd suppressed...

For most of us, visiting the Wall can be a positive, healing experience. If you do go, it will be in your own time, when you're ready. And the best time to go is over the veterans' holidays, when there are thousands of other vets there and plenty of support available.

No, you never get over it completely, as this thread reminds us.

[howaboutme]

34. Amen bro

If it was they (the JFKs,LBJ,RMN,GWB, etc) or their kids that were serving, we'd see far less war. Instead they and their kids and their cronies always profit and this travesty occurs again and again regardless of politics.

War is about raising money for the few, and death for the many.

[Bunny]

15. I know someone who went over when he was 19. He came back with a Purple Heart.

He also came back with some problems that linger to this day. Sad.

[deaniac21]

16. I lost 6 friends.

[lpbk2713]

17. I swear I've seen an old Navy buddy of mine in news photos.

We were stationed together in the mid 60's. I got out a year or two before him and we never kept touch with one another. But I'm almost certain it was him I saw in photos and film of John Kerry throwing his medals over the White House fence.

And about the wall. The traveling wall has been in my area a few times. I wanted to go see it out of respect but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I didn't think I could handle it.

[texanwitch]

18. Neighborhood kid, I can still remember him.

EARNEST RAY BYARS


LCPL - E3 - Marine Corps - Regular

Length of service 1 years
His tour began on Jul 30, 1967
Casualty was on Jul 30, 1967
In QUANG TRI, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, HELICOPTER - CREW
AIR LOSS, CRASH ON LAND
Body was recovered

Panel 24E - Line 50


He was about 19 when he died.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

20. That was my generation, but somehow, my immediate circle of family and friends was spared

although one of my college friends married a Vietnam vet who utterly refused to say a word about his experiences.

I knew intellectually that many of the soldiers killed were 18 and 19 years old, but it didn't impress me emotionally till years later in the 1980s, when I was teaching college. One of the students brought a box of doughnuts to class in celebration of his 19th birthday.

And that's when it hit me. I don't know why it was that moment. But it hit me.

Those guys who were killed in Vietnam were the same age as my current students. So young. So full of potential. Such an intriguing mixture of maturity and immaturity. And yet so dead.

[NNN0LHI]

21. Yes, his name was Tony

The smartest (Straight "A" student his entire life.), and kindest(He would literally give you his shirt off his back if you needed it.), person I ever knew. He wanted to become a tank commander. I went with him to the Army recruiter across the street from our high school when he enlisted. It was 1973 and the draft had ended.

He got his wish and served honorably in Vietnam. He returned from his first deployment a heroin addict. When I grew up with him he wouldn't even smoke cigarettes much less take any drugs. He blew his brains out on some train tracks behind his house soon after he returned home.

Don

[unkachuck]

22. yes Omaha....

....my Dennis was a guy named Pat Casidy....he was an average guy, a decent guy, a guy like the rest of us....

....we weren't great friends, but I knew him fairly well....I think of him often, I don't why....why some of us get taken out early in life and while others don't, perplexes me....may God love all the Pat Casidys' of the world....

[GreatCaesarsGhost]

23. In my small town where i grew up

we lost five - an only son, a set of twins and two brothers.

[pinboy3niner]

24. That is so tragic

It reminds me of the village of Beallsville, in Monroe County, OH, which wiki notes, "lost six of its 475 citizens to the war, the worst per-capita loss of life experienced by any place in the country."

For your town, the loss of an only son, a set of twins and two brothers must have been devastating.

[flyarm]

25. James was my neighbor, lived next door, he came back with no legs or arms..

Just his torso. He laid for over 1 year in a VA hospital. In a rat infested VA hospital.
He committed suicide when he was 24, with an over dose of pills. His folks were getting too old to take care of him..so he took his own life.

I started flying with a major US Airline when I was 19, many of our flight attendants at my base were ferrying the troops home that were injured and coffins. Most of those gals were never the same. We were Stewardesses then. Most of those gals wouldn't talk about what they saw when the war was over. Some came back on the regular line, but some quit because they were so effected by what they experienced.

In the years I flew, (33) I flew a few MAC flights, nothing prepares you to see 18 and 19 year olds falling asleep on their guns. And one is never prepared to wonder how many of those precious kids won't come home ever the same , if they are lucky enough to come home!

We have to stop these wars..it is up to all of us to put the pressure on to stop these wars, and I do not mean to deflect and pretend in our own little minds that they are over..we must make sure they are over and stopped completely! And now!

[laughingliberal]

26. My cousin. I was the oldest of 4 and he was the older brother I didn't have.

I still miss him.

:cry:

[unhappycamper]

27. A schoolmate friend of mine:

FREDERICK WILLIAM LENNON
SP4 - E4 - Army - Regular
Special Forces

Length of service 2 years
His tour began on Jan 20, 1966
Casualty was on Oct 17, 1966
In , SOUTH VIETNAM
Hostile, died while missing, GROUND CASUALTY
GUN, SMALL ARMS FIRE
Body was recovered

Panel 11E - Line 83

[Roon]

28. When I was 5-years-old, we had a lady next door whose husband

was MIA.Her husband was still missing when she moved away.

[hobbit709]

29. My graduating class had 414 in 1968, by 1971 15 were killed.

[northofdenali]

30. My ex didn't die there, but might as well have.

His best friend, Johnny Compton, did. My ex came back an absolute mess. It took him over 30 years to get his head straight enough to really function. Of course, by then we were divorced.

And it's 1, 2, 3 What are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn.........next stop is Viet Nam............ (Another Country Joe McDonald tune).

Can you imagine if we put the money from these useless, wasteful corporate wars into jobs programs like FDR did? Public works, fix roads and bridges, build parks, repair dams? This country might survive.

But I don't give it much hope, and don't expect much change, any longer. K&R

[Bandit]

31. I wonder how many Vietnamese feel and think the same way...

I would venture a bet the losses are closer to home than most here..

[howaboutme]

33. The nice thing about WAR

is that those who start it and profit from it always skate by with more riches, and their personal "get out of jail free" pass, while unsaid numbers of innocent civilians and the under class grunts who find themselves in uniform pay the ultimate price of death or life altering wounds.

We needed accountability and it should have started with the impeachment and war crime prosecution of Bush/Cheney and the criminal prosecution of his neocon friends who perpetrated the Iraq War. It was recommended by scholars, but instead it was taken off the table by the Speaker of the House. To be honest every time I think about Bush/Cheney getting immunity from impeachment I get really pissed. I will never forget this because I believe it to be a sell out of Americans to the elite that didn't want an investigation into either Iraq or 9-11.

There heads should have rolled as a disincentive to any future USA President, but instead they are all rewarded.


edited to add: I will never forget.......

[Hepburn]

32. Yes...George Ingalls -- March 9, 1946 – April 16, 1967 -- and I still cry over him.

Specialist Fourth Class Ingalls accompanied his squad on a night ambush mission. Shortly after the ambush was established, an enemy soldier entered the killing zone and was shot when he tried to evade capture. Other enemy soldiers were expected to enter the area, and the ambush was maintained in the same location. Two quiet hours passed without incident, then suddenly a hand grenade was thrown from the nearby dense undergrowth into the center of the squad's position. The grenade did not explode, but shortly thereafter a second grenade landed directly between Specialist Fourth Class Ingalls and a nearby comrade. Although he could have jumped to a safe position, Specialist Fourth Class Ingalls, in a spontaneous act of great courage, threw himself on the grenade and absorbed its full blast. The explosion mortally wounded Specialist Fourth Class Ingalls, but his heroic action saved the lives of the remaining members of his squad.

http://www.homeofheroes.com/photos/7_rvn/ingalls_a.html

:cry: