It Was an Honor

I had the great opportunity to visit the Vietnam Memorial today. I've seen it once before but today we found someone had left six or seven different "histories" next to certain individual's names. Below each corresponding panel there was a plastic covered "memorial" detailing how that person had served and died during that war. I read the first about a Sergent who was wounded and presumed dead, when his men returned to recover his body, he was gone. It was later learned he died from shrapnel wounds and a leg amputation performed in an enemy field hospital five days after the attack. Another was First Lt. Lane, a female nurse who was the only female in the Vietnam war to die as a direct result of enemy fire. (The hospital she was assigned to was bombed. She died from shrapnel wounds) I was grateful to whomever placed these histories there, it gave me a chance to know more about some of the people who's names are on the wall. Along with their stories was the location of their name on the memorial. I found myself searching to see the actual name on the shiny black marble feeling that it was my duty to honor them by seeing for myself. The wall is a memorial of a time before my time and I know no other way to honor those who are memorialized than to acknowledge them, to see their name and know that they lived, fought and died for their county. It fills me with purpose to believe that because I now know, in a small way their legacy continues. I guess that is the point of memorializing our dead that neither they nor their sacrifice ever be forgotten.