ARMY magazine refused to publish this letter to the editor because they said it was “political.” We’re sure the magazine has covered political DEI issues though.
By Lt. Col. Edwin L. Kennedy, Jr, US Army ret
“Foes No More: American Veterans Help Vietnamese Find Remains” in the December 2024 ARMY aptly points to the efforts by the communist Vietnamese and Americans to locate and memorialize the NVA and VC war dead. This is a commendable effort to heal the wounds of war.
This column (below) published in the Wall Street Journal in 2023 talks about this very issue of Vietnamese-U.S. reconciliation. Written by distinguished Marine combat veteran, former Secretary of the Navy and Virginia senator (D), Jim Webb, it is as important today as decades ago.
“In 1992, as a private citizen and veteran of the Vietnam War, I was seeking to begin a process of reconciliation with our former enemy and hosted a delegation of Vietnamese officials in Washington.
One of my objectives was to encourage Hanoi finally to make peace with the South Vietnamese veterans who had fought against the North and who after the war were labeled traitors, denied any official recognition as veterans, and hundreds of thousands were imprisoned in reeducation camps.
To make my point I brought them to the Confederate Memorial [Reconciliation Memorial]. Pointing across the Potomac River from Arlington National Cemetery toward the Lincoln Memorial, I told them the story of how America healed its wounds from our own Civil War.
The Potomac River was like the Ben Hai River, which divided North and South Vietnam. On the far side was our North, and here in Virginia was our South. After several bitter decades we came together, symbolized by the memorial.
If it is taken apart and removed, leaving behind a concrete slab, the burial marker of its creator, and a small circle of graves, it would send a different message, one of a deteriorating society willing to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding conjured up by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying.”
Sadly, our Arlington National Cemetery Reconciliation Memorial was subsequently “cancel-culture” removed in December 2023. That action sends a clear and very different message about “reconciliation”.
In South Vietnam, the communists destroyed all the memorials to our allies who died in the war from 1954-1975. Additionally, they bulldozed the cemeteries of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers, our allies, destroying the last physical remnants of their existence.
Reconciliation, as Senator Webb strongly alludes to, should not just be with the Americans. What about our good friends of the former Republic of Vietnam? What about the thousands of civilians murdered during Tet in the city of Hue and thrown into mass graves?
I hope they will be remembered by their conquerors but I seriously doubt it. Now it often seems we are emulating the communists rather than providing them a better example.
I commend CAPT Lundquist for his efforts. However, I hope his continued work with the Vietnamese will be able to include our courageous and erstwhile South Vietnamese allies who have been “cancel culture” erased from history in their own country.
LtCol Edwin L. Kennedy, Jr, USA, Ret
New Market, Alabama
Antifa Floyd protestors trying to take down a statue because it is “racist”:
US Government actually taking down a statue because it is “racist”:
Who needs communist protestors when the government will do it?
Thank you for helping to restore the Reconciliation Memorial in our ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMENTAIRE. As the descendant of great-grandfathers who fought in the Confederate Army to protect their families and homes, I am ashamed of our government’s callous disregard for removing the Peace Monument in Arlington. Where will it end? George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Columbus and so many others who shaped our great country. We have got to stop judging our ancestors by the enlightened standards of today. They were all products of the time in history they lived. It was a different world then. “Those who don’t learn from history are bound to repeat it”