Originally posted on August 2, 2020, one entry in my 60-part Flash-Memoir Series 2017-2021
Over sixty years ago today, on August 2, 1958, my CIA-employed parents were married in Germany. They sent letters home saying that they were the luckiest people in the world to have found each other.
I like to think of them that way, so happy and optimistic.
Six years later on their wedding anniversary (1964) the first of two "incidents" took place in Vietnam that prompted the U.S. Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution handing unlimited military power to President Johnson, escalating our involvement in Vietnam, and setting the stage for, at that time, America’s longest war, and unprecedented social strife.
The “incidents” would later be proven to be contrived events.
A 1971 Time Magazine article said, “ The North Vietnamese PT boat attacks on the U.S. destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 were among the most pivotal and controversial events of the war—and the Johnson Administration clearly deceived the public about them.”
Nine years ago on this day, on the 50th anniversary of the Tonkin Gulf Incident, I made my way to Washington, D.C so that I could visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall.
It was a sojourn I felt I must make if I were going to write further about the impact that the Vietnam War had on my family; I had to pay tribute to the soldiers who had been sent to a foreign land under false pretenses and who had lost so much physically, psychologically, and emotionally.
When I told a soldier what I was doing and asked for permission to use his photo, he thanked me.
“They can’t forget,” he said. “They have to remember. There are a lot of names on that wall.”
“His buddy was three days from coming home,” his wife said.
Tears stung my eyes. And not just for the friend they so obviously missed but for all who were affected.
Indeed, I feel as if the early joy of my parent’s relationship was forever eclipsed by the ever-present trauma they experienced at the end of their lives because of the Vietnam War.
As a friend of theirs wrote in 1988, "I wonder why memories of that benighted country and that fumbled war remain so intense?“
I soothe myself sometimes with the notion that our lives spiral ever upward, that history does not necessarily repeat, but that it does rhyme.
On this August 2, I ponder the kaleidoscopic images of a wedding filled with joy, an incident imbued with deceit, and a conversation filled with gratitude, and I find myself hoping that we are all part of a poem that is not yet complete. And that, despite our troubles, we can find the beat of better days ahead.