108 ~ A Memorial Day reflection: Who should we remember?

This Memorial Day weekend I'm reflecting on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Its long, black granite wall is inscribed with each of the names of the more than 58,000 Americans killed or missing in the conflict, and is justly praised for its compelling personalization of our country's loss. Visitors can see and touch each name, each loss, and I doubt anyone walks away from the memorial unmoved.

Yet the wall comes with a risk: a risk of casting America as the victim in the Vietnam conflict. To be sure, each American named on the wall is in a real sense a victim - of our country's myopathy and miscalculation, and also, it must be said, of our hubris and hypocrisy. America has long promoted itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom, yet in the early 1960s we blocked UN-mandated elections that would have peacefully reunified North and South Vietnam, because we feared the probable outcome and choice of the Vietnamese people, the election of Ho Chi Minh as head of the unified country. With the election blocked, the Vietnam War ensued.

The problem - and the danger - with victimhood is that a victim has nothing to do, no responsibility to accept, and so nothing to learn. We followed Vietnam with a similar debacle in Iraq, and our chaotic exit from Afghanistan was starkly similar to our exit from Vietnam.

Memorial Day was born in the aftermath of the US Civil War, and so it remembered all dead, from both sides of the conflict. Perhaps we would do well to return to something like it. Here's an idea: maybe it's time for America to build a second wall, across the street from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a wall inscribed with the names of the one million Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodians who died in our misguided war. If we did that, our country would show true maturity, and perhaps experience true healing.

We need to embrace the grief not only of what happened to us, but the grief of what we did. This is my wish for Memorial Day.