The memorial is effective. As you walk along the wall, gazing at the names engraved chronologically in the reflecting stone wall, you slowly enter the earth like the dead. Visitors can look up names in books, find their panels and etch a copy of a name to bring home with them. Some bring mementos or attend ceremonies if a status changes from MIA to recovered. There’s another statue to women who served and died. The statues of the three servicemen above look over the visitors at the enormous cost of the war. Over 58,000 Americans soldiers died, and over 300,000 were wounded.

Strangely, the memorial’s website doesn’t describe the war itself in any way, so I guess I have to try. Vietnam was both a civil war between the Vietnamese and a proxy war among the great powers at the time. The North, under Ho Chi Minh, had overthrown the French colonial government and wanted to unify the country under Communism. They were supported by China and Russia. The South was set up by France and allies to resist Communism, and we supported them with money, material, and military. Eventually, the weaker, more corrupt and incompetent South Vietnamese government failed, despite our extraordinary efforts to prop them up.

Robert McNamara, the architect of the US war in Vietnam, called the war a mistake in 1995 and said “we were wrong. I believe we were terribly wrong”. In retrospect, Kennedy’s effort to keep Vietnam from being the next ‘domino’ to fall to Communism, Johnson’s stubborn expansion of the war, and Nixon’s machinations were all failures. I have never read a credible analysis of how we could have won the war. Besides US casualties, millions of Vietnamese died and were crippled by Napalm and Agent Orange. About a decade after we left, the Communists had ruined the economy, and the Vietnamese abandoned that system on their own.

The park service has a responsibility to educate the public about history, in addition to memorializing the dead and remembering the sacrifice of veterans, regardless of controversy. Publishing the history of the Vietnam War on their site would be a good start.