On Nov. 7, Americans Honor Those Killed Fighting For Us In Vietnam

No less than Arlington National Cemetery, the Vietnam Memorial Wall is a sacred place. Like many veterans, virtually every day I think of some of my friends who were killed in Vietnam and are memorialized there. Every day.

Next week I will participate in the reading of the names of the fallen who are memorialized on the Vietnam Wall. Starting on Monday, Nov. 7, and going until midnight each day, it will take three and a half days to read all 58,281 names on the wall. For those of us participating, it is part of our promise never to forget and always to honor the lives of our friends and comrades who gave their all in the service of the nation.

People now forget, never knew, or choose to lie about it, but aside from family, friends, and the military, the country did not truly mourn their deaths. Neither individually nor as a group were they accorded the honor, the respect, or the sorrow — whether ersatz or real — of the sort now heaped upon drug-addled criminals killed by police.

Since then, a few of those who slandered them have apologized. But very few. Others have tried to pretend that they opposed the government but “supported the troops” all along. To put it politely, balderdash.

We remember you. Not to remember would be to betray our comrades whose names are carved on the wall. We remember that privileged college students, faculty, the left, and much of the Democrat Party supported the killing of our soldiers.

They now pretend otherwise. But in their classrooms, at their “anti-war” rallies, and on their TV networks, they lauded our enemies. They waved the flags of our enemies who were trying to kill us, and who did kill those memorialized on the wall. That flag-waving was intended to encourage our enemies in their bloody work. It was not just the fringe who did this. It included those who from 1992 have controlled the levers of power in the Democrat Party.

For these leftists, many of whom still wield power today, those of us fighting because the country sent us there were “baby killers,” murderers, and rapists. Consider, for example, the words of our current “climate czar” in the speech that launched his political career, describing those who fought in Vietnam.

John Kerry says these American soldiers had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

According to Kerry, these were “not isolated incidents but were crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all