Thank you to Vietnam veterans- Welcome home!

If you know someone who served, thank them for it.

(Maine Writer-  My husband is a Navy veteran who served with Mobile Construction Battalion 71 (MCB71) in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Thank you!)  In my opinion, Vietnam veterans need to hear what they did not receive after surviving their tour- "Welcome Home!"

We can debate whether Vietnam was folly and a fool's errand, and in doing so, diminish the impact it had upon those who served in good faith.

Richard L'Heureux MCB 71 Chu Lai, Vietnam

We can pretend that teenagers sent a half a world away to fight for a country they never heard of, who struggled for their very lives in jungles and rice paddies, didn't return as three-dimensional ghosts.

‘Remembrance is vital for our society’: Honoring 40 years of the Vietnam wall. Echo report published in The Repository newspaper by Thuan Le Elston:

A co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund describes how it has played a pivotal role in the cultural shift America has made in separating the war from the warrior.

How do you feel about the Vietnam wall now?

I first saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial three decades ago, on my first trip to Washington, D.C. 

As a war refugee whose family escaped the fall of Saigon in 1975 when I was 8, I wanted to see and touch the wall, but I can't say I had been looking forward to it.

The people whose names are engraved onto the granite wall died fighting a conflict over my birthplace, even as their fellow Americans protested to end the war and bring them home. My father and uncles fought in the same war, to save Vietnam from communism. We failed, we fled, and now we're U.S. citizens.

What a heavy mental trip. 

As soon as I stepped onto the descending path leading to the shiny black wall on the National Mall and saw the U.S. military veterans and their families among the tourists, I fought the feeling that everyone was staring at me. Irrationally or not, I felt guilty. I also saw my reflection in the wall among all those names and I mourned – a mourning for all the dead as well as the living, just as the memorial's designer, Maya Lin, had intended.

Since my first trip there, I've married and moved my family to Northern Virginia. My father-in-law, Bob Elston Sr., was an Army first lieutenant posted in South Vietnam in 1968, when he learned his first son had been born in New Jersey. That son, Bob Jr., ended up marrying a Vietnamese American: me.

We've been to the wall many times with our kids as well as visiting family and friends. I now find comfort and purpose whenever I walk the beautiful wall – the most popular memorial on the National Mall, attracting more than 5 million people each year – and see our reflections among the names.

Richard L'Heureux, a Maine native, Vietnam Veteran in the Lewiston Maine Veterans Memorial Park

As Robert Doubek, a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF), tells me, "Remembrance is vital for our society because freedom does not come for free."

I spoke with Doubek, an Air Force veteran, about how he got involved with the memorial and what he wants you to know about the wall. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

My tour in Vietnam lasted one year, ending on Thanksgiving Day 1969. As a U.S. Air Force intelligence officer, I had the unusual assignment of interrogating North Vietnamese prisoners of war for information about U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam, the effectiveness of U.S. airstrikes and infiltration down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 

I reality, the majority of prisoners were 19-year-old rice farmers with only six years of education who could provide little that was useful.

As an interrogator, I was authorized to wear civilian clothes, so I wasn’t identifiable as a Vietnam War veteran when I arrived home. I was then based in Texas, where people were still basically favorable toward the military. But when I came to Washington, D.C., for law school in 1971, I seldom mentioned that I had served in Vietnam. The dominant attitude among the young professionals there was that anyone who did military service – especially in Vietnam – had to be stupid.

How did you get involved in the memorial project, and how long did it take to complete?

I graduated law school in 1974, but found work as a lawyer to be unfulfilling. I began to hear that many Vietnam War veterans were having trouble readjusting to civilian life, so I thought I might volunteer my legal skills to help some of them. 

Consequently, I was invited to a meeting in April 1979, called to generate publicity for the needs of the veterans, such as treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. At the meeting one veteran, Jan Scruggs, stood up and asked, “What about a memorial?” The general response was that Vietnam veterans needed more benefits, not a memorial. I, however, thought it was a good idea, so I advised him that he needed to form a tax-exempt nonprofit corporation to carry out such a project. He asked me to do the legal work to set up the corporation and to be one of the founding directors. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was incorporated on April 27, 1979.

After working as a volunteer for six months, I became so fascinated by the prospect of creating a national memorial from scratch that I left my legal career to become the first VVMF employee – the executive director. Formal groundbreaking took place on March 26, 1982, and the memorial was dedicated on Nov. 11, 1982.