|
|
|
Seasoned Vet
Group: Community Supporter
Last Login: Today @ 1:10 AM
Posts: 5,234,
Visits: 3,761
|
|
By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 16, 2003; Page B01
Unlike typical Father's Day cards, the handwritten messages attached to hundreds of roses at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial yesterday morning offered thanks not for help with homework or baseball but for protecting American freedom, and spoke not of the future but of the past.
"I miss sitting on your shoulders," a grown woman named Sue wrote her dad. "Mom never remarried," wrote another. "Thank you for helping make America safe," said one writer. Some were darker: "I'm sorry Snoopy, it should have been me instead of you."
And these cards weren't delivered in the typical way. Written for the thousands of men who either died or went missing in the Vietnam War, the notes were part of an annual Father's Day remembrance ceremony, affixed to long-stemmed roses and placed at the base of the black granite structure.
About 60 people stood in a field of long, wet grass across from the Wall shortly before 8 a.m. for the ceremony, which for some feels like the only appropriate way to pass Father's Day. Children who never met their grandfathers played as biker veterans in matching leather vests stood solemnly and grown daughters hugged.
Donna Jackson, 38, came from Cambridge, England, to remember her father, Air Force Staff Sgt. Robert G. Gerling, who died from liver cancer attributed to Agent Orange. This Father's Day was especially hard, she said, because she just got her doctorate -- in U.S. foreign policy since the 1960s. Jackson, whose mother is English and who speaks with a British accent, said she chose that course of study "because I wanted to find someone to blame," though the complexities of the war have left her without a target. "I wish he'd been there to see me get it," she said of her doctorate.
Members of one group who came for the ceremony said this year felt like their first real Father's Day, because they had gone for the first time this spring to Vietnam to find out more about how their fathers had lived and died.
"We didn't know anything -- how he looked, smelled, what kind of person he was," said Kimberly Kendrick, 33, who was 2 months old when her father, Pfc. Richard Kendrick, 20, was killed in Cambodia in 1970. Like others on the trip, which was sponsored by the survivors' group Sons and Daughters in Touch, Kendrick said no one spoke much about her father while she was growing up because the Vietnam War was so unpopular. Now, said Kendrick, a legal assistant from Woodbridge, she knows more about him. "This Father's Day is totally different."
Kelly Coleman Rihn, whose father died in Vietnam when she was 7 months old, said she is grateful that children who lost parents in the current Iraq conflict won't go through that sort of isolation.
"This year was hard because Iraq was on TV all the time," said Rihn, 37, a respiratory therapist from Pittsburgh who brought her two daughters to the ceremony. "Whenever I'd hear someone died, my first thought was always, 'Was he a dad?' "
In the annual ceremony, red roses are placed at the Wall for soldiers killed in action, and yellow roses commemorate soldiers who remain missing. This year, new flowers were added -- white roses -- for soldiers killed in Iraq.
While only a few dozen of the 1,000 roses were white, the continuing cycle of loss had a very real face: Lt. Col. Frank Adamouski, a Vietnam veteran from Springfield who lost his son in April in Iraq.
"This year is especially significant to me because after 29 years of sharing a son who turned every man he met into a father, he is no longer on this earth," said Adamouski, whose son, Army Capt. James F. Adamouski, was a Black Hawk pilot slated to start classes at Harvard Business School this fall.
As tour groups began to mill about the Wall, many at the ceremony worried that Vietnam veterans were being forgotten. They agonized that young Americans aren't taught enough about the war. They complained that Congress hasn't approved a visitors center next to the memorial and saw meaning even in the unkempt grass.
"Kids don't know Vietnam's place in history or why this was such a long and divisive war," said Alan Greilsamer, spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which organized the event.
If there were a visitors center, he said, there would be a place to display the 64,000 items that have been left at the Wall since it was dedicated in 1982. The items, which include a motorcycle, a wedding dress and a sonogram, are in a warehouse in Maryland, though Greilsamer noted that some have been displayed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.
This Father's Day simply added more pieces to the mosaic.
"Stephanie has your freckles," the note on one rose updated a long-dead grandfather. "In honor of a father who didn't make it home," read another, addressed simply to "soldier
------------------------------------------------------------ Out of every 100 men, ten shouldn't even be there, Eighty are just targets, Nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back." - Hericletus, circa 500 BC ----------------------------------------------------------- 
|
|
|
|