Bringing It All Back Home by Philip F. Napoli

Author:Philip F. Napoli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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BECOMING VETERANS: EDELMAN, GERMAN, AND PAS

In May 2005, at a small ceremony on a cold, blustery day, the former New York City mayor Edward I. Koch recalled the dedication twenty years earlier of the New York City Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the parade of twenty-five thousand Vietnam veterans across the Brooklyn Bridge and down New York City’s famed Canyon of Heroes. Witnessed by an estimated one million people, the 1985 parade was led by the wheelchair-bound Long Island assemblyman John L. Behan; at the time, it was said to be the largest ticker-tape parade in the city’s history. These events, Koch recalled, were a tipping point in the city’s relationship with its Vietnam veterans. Ten years after the war ended, the veterans were finally, really, welcomed home.

The memorial at 55 Water Street in lower Manhattan is a wall of glass blocks inscribed with portions of eighty-three letters, poems, clips from The New York Times, and words from American presidents and other leading figures. The memorial and parade played an important part in the emergence of a community of Vietnam veterans in New York City. Vietnam veterans themselves kindled a new relationship with the city as they worked to change public perceptions and to help veterans in need.

The memorial and parade were also reactions to specific events. On January 30, 1981, New York City hosted a parade for the returning hostages who had been held in the American embassy in Iran. A reported 1,250 tons of confetti greeted them as they traveled the Canyon of Heroes. Amid all the hoopla, some Vietnam veterans became resentful. Bobby Muller, a Marine lieutenant who lost both legs in Vietnam in 1969, told The New York Times, “That’s what probably would have been for us, if we had won.” He went on, “A lot of guys paid a heavy price, and for many of them there is no sense of appreciation or recognition of what they went through.”1 The wish for a parade that would honor returned Vietnam veterans grew out of that experience.2

The political needs of Mayor Koch mattered, too. A sergeant during World War II, he understood the significance of military service. He was also a divisive figure in New York City politics. Honoring New York City’s veterans, many of them working-class white ethnics and a critical component of his political base, was both politically savvy and a matter of personal conscience.

In 1981, Mayor Koch appointed twenty-seven citizens to begin planning a memorial that would acknowledge the service of those New Yorkers who served in the Vietnam War. This group gravitated toward two ideas: a physical memorial to New York City’s Vietnam veterans and a “living memorial” to assist those veterans who had needs that were not being met by agencies of the government. In 1982, the twenty-seven were transformed into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Commission, which had a hundred members, the inner core of whom were Vietnam veterans. This group built the memorial, created the assistance program, and gave shape to a powerful restatement of the Vietnam experience.

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