President Barack Obama designated March 29, 2012, as Vietnam Veterans Day. The presidential proclamation coincided with the 50th anniversary of the start of a war that remains for our nation a source of controversy.
Of the 2.3 million U.S. military personnel who served there, we count the names of 58,286 chiseled into the Vietnam War memorial as the number that made the ultimate sacrifice. They are among the estimated 1.8 million combatant and civilian lives lost on both sides. Those counts are not final.
Words added to our vocabulary continue to affect our nation and our veterans. Agent Orange and post-traumatic stress disorder were not in the dictionary when the war ended in 1975.
Returning veterans were forced to take their pleas for justice into the Veterans Administration and to Congress, and their pursuits continue. A disability-claims backlog appears to be a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet, at the local VA, more than 60 percent of veterans seeking treatment for PTSD are of the age of those who served in Vietnam. They confront the reality that PTSD did not fade but instead gained power over their lives as it festered in denial, a darkness deepened by our government's decision to abandon the vets. So much time was wasted as bureaucrats procrastinated rather than taking action to heal our soldiers.
Last month, the Senate failed to pass a bill to extend health care benefits to hundreds of thousands of additional veterans each year, to provide family planning aid to war-injured vets and to make caregiver support — now available only to 9/11 veterans — available to families from all U.S. wars. On the second anniversary of the president's proclamation, it would serve all veterans if their fellow Americans contacted their senators to urge them to pass this bill.
Mr. Obama's presidential proclamation remains the only one related to the Vietnam War since President Jimmy Carter pardoned all who had violated the Selective Service Act during the years of that war. It is intended to raise the awareness of the American public to the plight of men and women who continue to fight their battles here at home.
Occasionally, a battle is won as when symptoms attributed to Agent Orange have afflicted enough lives that it can no longer be repressed as war-related. Only when the long-suffering patients can claim the attention due them will the VA's motto, "To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan," be realized. That, of course, assumes the veterans have lived through the long wait and the claims process. Trust me, many have not.
Dan New, a writer and Vietnam veteran, will curate a Bookmarks reading event at the Arts Center of the Capital Region in Troy May 5. Email him at Dnew1@nycap.rr.com.