The Wailing Wall

I have never been to Vietnam, though I feel like I've been there a million times.

Though I don't know a single soul who lost his life there, I feel as if I know them all -- I've placed my hands on the black, granite wall many a dozen times, and I've felt their names etched sharply in granite -- it is both searing and touching.  Everytime I run by the Wall, I am deeply moved and shaken like one of my own was over there and now honored in glory on that Wall 

The War was messy with no clear lines and broken dreams shattered in a million pieces.  And then those who survived returned home but were not given a Hero's welcome. 

They were treated poorly by by fellow Americans as if it was there own fault for going over there -- what a shame -- never again.

Today, I got to meet hundreds of refugees, this time from their native country, who were also treated poorly and targeted as an object of ridicule for an unpopular war that had destroyed so many lives.

These refugees were abandoned, shunned and disgraced even in their own country.  To make matters worse, they did not have a network of supporters -- they did not know their fathers and their mothers had abandoned them -- a double betrayal of the worse kind.

Despite not knowing them, their faces, their character, even their names, the sons and daughters of U.S. Servicemen (known as Amerasians) assembled at the Wall to pray for their fathers, many of their names were sadly carved on that black wall, oblivious to the fact that they bore kindred in that foreign land that cost them their lives.

Please read this poignant story posted on Fox DC 

It will deeply move you.

Ameriasian Fellowship Association

I have been to the Wall hundreds of times -- more times that I can ever count or remember.  But this images resembling the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem will always stay with me.

Now it's time to run on....