Dishonoring Vietnam women vets.

At the Vietnam Memorial late in 2009.  Photo speaks for itself.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the most iconic and sacred of sites in Washington, D.C.  The Wall itself bears the names of over 58,000 American men and women who died or who went missing in action.

Their memory is chiseled into that wall’s black marble, never to be forgotten; always to be honored in perpetuity each day, as scores of grateful Americans and others walk by, sometimes pausing to make an etching of a loved one lost in the far-away jungles of Vietnam.

Across a grassy space away from the wall stand two statues commemorating the service of thousands of draftees.  The first is the “Three Servicemen Statue” depicting fighting men standing shoulder to shoulder.

The second sculpture is that of the Vietnam “Women’s Memorial Statue.”  It portrays volunteer military service women painfully in the midst of a combat area of operations:
 
One is seen holding a severely wounded American soldier in her arms, consoling him while another is looking desperately at the skies, anticipating the descent of a helicopter to whisk him to the nearest field hospital.  (MASH:  Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.)

(A third nurse remains unseen in my photos because she is positioned kneeling behind the field of view staring at an empty helmet.)

A few days ago, according to stories in the two links that I am providing you below,  photographer Matthew Munson snapped a photo of two children climbing the women’s memorial, treating it as if it were a piece of playground equipment.

Battlefield anguish explains the furor over this statue's misuse.

Please read each of these links and read for yourselves the outrage that this has generated.
But it’s not the first time it has happened.

There are two other shots, this time photographed by me.  They appear in this post, and one of them shows two other young children also climbing the women’s monument in a scene eerily similar to that of Matthew Munson’s snapshot.

I captured the action from the same angle as Munson’s in late 2009 while some of my family and I were visiting that area of the U.S. Capital. 
 
I was just as disgusted then as I am at this writing.

I know, I know!  It’s not the fault of the kids who were too young to have internalized the negative impact of their conduct.   But I clearly observed the parents standing nearby, fully aware of how their children were amusing themselves, yet blithely ignoring the whole episode in a fog of ignorance.  Appalling!

Are we to unthinkingly assume that no other such incidents have occurred in the six intervening years?

Thanks for reading and be good to yourselves.

(Click on the photos for an enhanced view.)