Shrapnel in the Heart by Laura Palmer

Author:Laura Palmer [Palmer, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76563-5
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

July 5, 1985

Dear Lieutenant:

I’m here today with my son, Jim, and my dearest friend, Debbie. It’s been fifteen years since I put you, already dying, onto a dustoff. Losing you was so devastating to the platoon because you were so much more than our Lieutenant. You were our leader, our friend, our confidant, our brother, our heart.

Even after I came home I felt responsible for your death since you were hit on one of my squad’s tracks, and for the others I’d left when I took a job off the line. I felt I should have been with them. I knew on an intellectual level I wasn’t responsible but the guilt that lay in my heart stayed for years.

Finally on Veterans Day, 1979, I went to Arlington Cemetery, sat down and cried out loud “I’m sorry you’re dead but I must get on with my life. What do you want?” The answer I got was so swift and strong it was as if it had been spoken. “We are dead but you live and through you we live. Don’t let America forget us.”

So I’ve gone to Arlington every Veterans and Memorial Day and went to the ceremonies dedicating this wall and the statue in 1982 and 1984. I’ve met a lot of very special men. Men America needs.

Last May I went to New York City for the dedication of its Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It was a trip I really didn’t want to make but I felt I had to go for you and the others who couldn’t. I found not cold-hearted New Yorkers, but Americans who looked you straight in the eye, sometimes with tears, and welcomed us home and thanked us for the sacrifices we’d made. I saw mothers holding up pictures of their precious treasure, their son. Finally America has awakened and taken home those of us who live and remember you and all the others.

I tried so much to keep you alive the day you died and I tried to keep your spirit alive while the country for which you died tried to forget you. At last you live again but not just in the hearts of us who loved you. You live in America’s heart as well.

Even people who didn’t lose a friend or relative in Vietnam are touched by this wall and those who did lose someone reach out and touch it. My son is just one year old. I’ve tried to imagine the pain parents feel when they see their son’s name here. But the love that develops between men who’ve fought together, protected each other, bound each other’s wounds, and together grieved the loss of another is a very special love.

The memory of you and the loss of you is with me almost every day. I miss you, I love you and I’ll never forget you but I don’t have to go to dedications, parades or reunions but can now go because I want to. I kept your spirit alive till America woke up, sir.

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