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It's a moniker I often regret choosing, but puns keep coming. After reading the Rescorla story, I realized that a lot of you Vietnam vets were more patriotic than the WWII variety "save the world or else" draftees and volunteers. A lot of you guys knew you were just game pieces, but you went (or stayed after figuring it out) anyway. On some level, it must have amazed the VC's handlers back in Moscow. It put meaning back into the phrase "Come and Take Them." I don't put much stock in the JBS, but Susan Huck shreds the American elite in her Vietnam Falls: it's time to establish responsibility article. I see the JBS has taken it offline. If Halberstam skewers the elite from the left in Best and the Brightest, Huck skewers them there from the far right. I'm sure that they deserve both. Of course their direct academic descendants are the cultural relativists, Marxist feminists, and post-structuralists of today. I just shake my head when I realize that McNamara basically killed our missile defense program until President Reagan was elected, but I digress.

Some years back, I attended a Memorial Day Service at a local cemetery. The speaker was a retired Marine, whose name has long escaped me, sad to say.

He recognized veterans by the conflicts they served in, beginning with WWI (of which there were two in attendance). For each group that followed, he had appropriate remarks to make. For WWII, the obligatory comments about saving the world, and rightly so. For Korea, that those men were the first casualties of the cold war.

Then he got to the Vietnam veterans. And those comments I memorized, and know by heart, to this day:

"You men fought two wars. You fought the war of attrition in the free-fire zones of Vietnam. Then you fought the war of scorn, contempt and indifference at home. And to all of you, I say, good job, well done, and welcome home."

Words to live by.

Wish I could remember his name.