Separating War And The Warriors

(CBS)  This commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer.

---

The Iraq War is deeply unpopular and has been for more than two years. Yet the men and women who served in this long battle are not unpopular. Americans worry about them, respect them and try to honor them. This might not be the case except for November 13, 1982.

That Veterans Day 25 years ago was when the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated on the Washington Mall. It was a memorial late in coming and filled with controversy. No one expected that day 25 years ago that the Wall would become the most visited memorial in the nation's capital. Some 4.5 million people come to visit each year.

Memorials at their best don't just commemorate history; they inform the present and steer into the future. The living legacy of the Vietnam Memorial belongs to today's soldiers.

Jan Scruggs was the Vietnam Vet who did more than anyone to get the Wall built. "The great lesson of the Vietnam Memorial is that it separated the war from the warrior," he told me last week.

Scruggs was an infantryman from Bowie, Maryland, who was wounded in Vietnam War. He later got a graduate degree in psychology. He's interested in things like Carl Jung and emotional dynamics of groups - the collective. In the late 1970s, Scruggs felt Vietnam's "survivors needed a societal recognition."

Many Americans didn't give the veterans and casualties of Vietnam that recognition. They were called "baby killers" and became the innocent scapegoats for a guilty government and for a society that mostly sent its poor and disadvantaged off to the jungle.

The fight to get the Wall built had an ugly side. The design by Maya Lin was especially controversial. "The Vietnam Memorial was black and the other monuments were white," Scruggs said, keeping Jung in mind.

Most of the vets groups wanted a traditional war monument: heroic, white and tall. Scruggs and his gang wanted great architecture. They got it, as any of the 40 million people who have walked by the 58,253 names chiseled in the black granite now know.

"The wall is reflective," Scruggs said. "You can see your face in it." Perhaps that is the recognition needed by a society that treated the warriors of Vietnam so poorly. In that sense, the Wall is not a memorial, but a place of forgiveness.

Scruggs and many others are now trying to raise the money to build a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center. The idea is that since millions of people come to the Wall each year, why not add on a place to display more history, not just about Vietnam, but America's soldiers?

"The impact of the Wall today is being felt by the military veterans who are returning from Iraq," Scruggs said. "They are being treated as sympathetic figures. People want to buy them a beer."

That does not mean Iraq war veterans always get the health care and support they need. That does not mean the bureaucracies they must rely on will be transformed. It does not mean that more soldiers won't be killed.

Memorials do not make leaders wise, statesmen able and citizens alert. But great monuments can be a mirror for the people who come to look at them and can reflect some clear, new light.

---

E-mail questions, comments, complaints, arguments and ideas to Against the Grain. We will publish some of the interesting (and civil) ones, sometimes in edited form.
By Dick Meyer

[alanrobisch]

virtually every major war began with a democrat in office including Vietnam which was the most hated and where we treated, no liberals treated the returning soldiers as scum

tax guy dave

this is a copy of my words in my original post I said virtually and I guess you are trying to be vindictive since i was apologizing not trying to trump anyone.

[taxguydave]

Robisch--If I''m straining at gnats, then you are engaging in historical revisionism of your own words. You said that ALL, not most, major wars were started with a Democrat in office, which is quite an oversight for a BA in American history. Did you earn that at Bob Jones University?

[alanrobisch]

As far as the Gulf war it was a popular war and George Bush did an excellent job of diplomacy in managing the war and fought the entire war with a minimum of casualties

His failure to be re-elected was due to economic woes and his tax increases which as you noted he swore he wouldn''t do. REad my lips no new taxes. He punted because of the high deficit

It is true that the war incited Bin Laden to create Al Qaeda, but blaming GWB the first for this is strictly 20-20 hindsight. His invasion of Iraq was the right thing IMho.

I am sure that many years from now a historian will piece together the various reasons for the current problems and I am sure that other reasons will be found for the Muslim terrorism besides freeing Kuwait after its conquest by Iraq

[alanrobisch]

tax guy daye I think you are straining at gnats. I did not study the vietnam war. I lived through it. I do not claim to be expert in it.

I do know from reading and watching programs and from living through it that the escalation of the war began when Johnson was in power and that he did not run for re-election because of the unpopular war.

this whole debate began when I stated that democrats were in power when most major wars started. Jejasdemo called this right wing BS. I stand by what I said. This was not an attempt to portray democrats as war mongers as Tejasdemo claimed republicans were.

I think every president takes going to war seriously and neither republican or democrats take going to war lightly

[taxguydave]

Gee, Desert Storm was so popular that GHW lost his bid for re-election the next year. It certainly didn''t help him that he had previously made the infamous "Read my lips--no new taxes" pledge, but I remember Desert Storm coming up frequently during the campaign. Many Americans didn''t think that American blood and money should be spent to prop up the Saudi regime, who would later pay us back with 9/11.

My father processed the bodies of US Marines from 1959-1961 arriving in Long Beach, CA (he was a USMC Lieutenant assigned to the Naval Brig). He saw several bodies arrive from Vietnam via Hawaii that were clearly combat casualties. Ike was President at the time.

You may have a BA in American History. I''ve studied American history most of my life, mostly as a hobby. It doesn''t take a BA, though, to have lived through Vietnam or the ''92 Presidential campaign.

While I was in college earning my own BA (electrical engineering), I worked at a plasma center, where mostly homeless people go to get a few bucks donating blood plasma. At least half of our homeless donors were Vietnam vets. Some were still wearing their Army fatigues (this was in the early 80''s).

[creeper00]

Say a prayer for the 194,254 homeless american veterans tonight!


Posted by Quatrops at 09:15 PM : Nov 09, 2007

Why not try pointing out my errors than using your usual ad hominem attacks
Posted by alanrobisch2 at 09:56 PM : Nov 09, 2007

Are you totally dense, alan? That''s exactly what he was doing.

Or do you not remember writing this: "I work in the social welfare field and have not noticed this disproportionality of homeless among veterans."?

[alanrobisch]

My last robisch-yawn for tonight, I promise. I''''ve never seen a better example of picking and choosing from the vast quantity of often contradictory and inaccurate historical "fact" and building an impregnable box containing one''''s pre-conceived (though not particularly logical) conclusion. Keep in mind that Jerico''''s walls did, eventually, come tumblin'''' down.

Say a prayer for the 194,254 homeless american veterans tonight!


Posted by Quatrops at 09:15 PM : Nov 09, 2007

Why not try pointing out my errors than using your usual ad hominem attacks. I unlike you know I am not perfect and far from all knowing and my opinions are often are just that. I try to substantiate my points probably not well at times but I try to be straight. apparently you just aren''t willing to concede that I might be right at times

[quatrops]

My last robisch-yawn for tonight, I promise. I''ve never seen a better example of picking and choosing from the vast quantity of often contradictory and inaccurate historical "fact" and building an impregnable box containing one''s pre-conceived (though not particularly logical) conclusion. Keep in mind that Jerico''s walls did, eventually, come tumblin'' down.

Say a prayer for the 194,254 homeless american veterans tonight!

[alanrobisch]

THE ROME EMPIRE FALL BECAUSE OF THE SAME SITUATION THAT THE MISERY OF THE POOR IS THE PROSPERITY OF THE RICH.. THANKS BUSH. FOR THE SAME ***...


Posted by V_1618 at 10:16 AM : Nov 09, 2007

Please we have the wealthiest nation on earth and the poor in our country would be well off by the standards of many countries. Rome did not fall because of poverty. some as gibbons believe it was due to introduction of christianity. I believe it came because of the strong forces coming from barbarian forces and the weakened social structure of Rome.

Ps the post of tjasdemo claimed what was factual was not. this is ignorance
+

[alanrobisch]

PS: I note you continue to judge "ignorant" those who disagree with your opinions or your interpretation of historical events. Does humility EVER intrude on your life?

Posted by Quatrops at 07:45 PM : Nov 09, 2007

I guess humility doesn''t intrude on yours either. I have studied history and just about anything that is readable through out my life and have heard that oral histories can be very acurate because of the extraordinary importance that people who knew these stories put to them and the importance of making them accurate because they represented the central parts of their lives.

In ancient religions it was considered critical to perform ceremonies in a precise way therefore it was very important that the knowledge of how they were performed was very important. It was felt if they were not done correctly they would not be affective. also note the ability to record history began almost 5000 yrs ago. We have no certain way of knowing if the stories were not previously written down. Note the gilgamesh epic is an example of the congruency of legends of the flood. This was written in sumerian cuneiform.

+