Dave was my best friend and proof that the good die young. I met him in high school, and a year or so after graduation he dropped by my apartment to tell me that he had joined the Navy "for security".
The Navy trained him as a corpsman, and he served a year in Okinawa before being reassigned to the Marines. After training at Camp Pendleton, he was sent to Vietnam. How the men of his platoon must have wept when the mortar fragments ripped through his body, killing him so soon after he had rendered them aid while being wounded himself and for which he was posthumously awarded a Bronze Star for valor.
I've been to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., and found his name among the 56,000 etched into that solemn black granite wall.
Yet it only represents a portion of the tears shed in that needless war. If that five hundred foot long wall was extended to include all Vietnamese combat fatalities, it would be over a mile in length. And for what? Here are a few photos that make the sacrifices of so many seem that much more tragic:
"Yet so it shall be; these fruitless strifes, these ruinous wars shall pass away, and the 'Most Great Peace' shall come." --Bahá’u’lláh
