I've been back to San Diego several times since the early 1970's, but I have never made it back to the cemetery. I realize that many of the parents of those young men buried there have also passed on. I wonder if anyone still visits those graves anymore. Over four decades later, with most of the parents gone, do the brothers and sisters and sons and daughters still visit? The little boy that drew the stick figures holding hands in that little note, does he still leave flowers and flags on the grave of his older brother whom he loved so much?
I used this line, referring to the headstones, in one of my poems from that time, "...the old stone tabs we keep on our dead."
In just a few years, the long war would finally be over. The U.S.-backed government of South Vietnam fell. The United States entirely pulled out of Vietnam after that. And all of these four decades later, I am still alive, wondering why I and others were spared and why these young men were not.
I used to read A.E. Housman in those troubling days, and he also wrote about war dead from the Boer War and WWI: "Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;/But young men think it is, and we were young."
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