A Symbol with Impact

Tonight the President will lay out his case for more U.S. troops to be deployed in Afghanistan. He will deliver his speech from the United States Military Academy at West Point, in New York State.

It’s a first, because modern presidents have delivered such addresses to the nation from the Oval Office. I don’t know why he has chosen that venue. Presumably he will explain it this evening.

But I firmly believe that if he wanted a symbol for expanding the war, then he could have chosen a location that depicts much more graphically the results of warfare – our dead and wounded – like, for example, the site of the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial.

I was there Sunday, and I assure you, my respected readers, that The Wall and the statues underscore the carnage of that conflict much more realistically than the one the President chose to rationalize what he is about to do. But if he delivered that address near The Wall, what impact would it have on his credibility?

Photo by Dick Bergeron:  Vietnam Nurses War Memorial, Washington, D.C.

An Afternoon of Reflection in Washington, D.C.

With the Thanksgiving holiday coming to an end this Sunday and the good weather making it feel more like early spring, Priscille and I, as guests of the Potomac, Maryland branch of the family, decided to drive into our nation’s Capital. Destination: the war memorials, all within easy walking distance of each other.

I wanted very much to visit those places of reverence again, because America is now at a critical juncture in its multi-front struggle against the extreme elements of worldwide, violent Jihadist terrorism.

Early in the afternoon, we paid our respects at The Vietnam War Nurses Memorial; the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall; the statues of The Three Soldiers; the Korean War Veterans Memorial and the World War II Memorial.

It was my second visit to those shrines, and the one which has always tugged at me most is The Vietnam Wall: It’s all those seemingly endless names etched on black stone remembering Americans who never returned home. And the whispered silence of visitors as they walk slowly along the rise and fall of that great stone wall, stopping randomly, touching the stone at times, staring at those names, and waiting for an explanation. “Why?”

Vietnam cost America dearly in blood, money and spirit. The war against Jihadist extremists, a very real threat to the West, will cost us just as dearly if it is as badly directed from Washington as was that long-ago conflict in the rice paddies, jungles and tunnels of Vietnam.