“On the other side of eternity rest the fallen of Vietnam’s battlefield, forever ‘youthful and strong, loving and loyal,’ and there they look back on a nation that betrayed itself out of a generation of heroic influence and lost something of itself in the process.
“They didn’t return home to teach the finer and the ordinary points of life to the children they didn’t father and weren’t there to do so for the children they did.
They did not return to mature in their lives and take their places in the towns, farming communities, and cities they came from.
They didn’t live to bury their parents, see their children marry, coach little league, run for town council, or influence events they never saw.
For them, there were no parades, no 4th of July picnics, school plays, concerts, or recitals.
“They died ‘forever young,’ and forever in the heroic pose known to a choice few in the history of human events: as defenders of what is right and true and worth defending.
“For the soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and Coast Guardsmen, living and died who served there, Viet Nam was and will remain a moral triumph. What they did lives on as a privileged inheritance from those taught by long example that to achieve liberty is rare, to keep it, costly.
“The battlefield in Viet Nam was not lost. It was abandoned to the darkness, but not by those who fought and died there for freedom, for Viet Nam, and for each other.
John Puzzo
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