My Friends, Gentlemen and Ladies:

Seems we do think alike. Yesterday, Sunday, I went to Little Saigon, and observe the wall, the Traveling Viet Nam Memorial Moving Wall in fact. I went alone, with a bag of mixed and confused feelings, hoping to find some answers.

I saw alot, and I felt alot, and I learned alot (I think). And as I stood there, alone, in a sea of vets, both American and Vietnamese, and a flood of flags, both big Red White and Blue, and the small yellow and red paper flags. I listened to the conversations. The organizers wanted to hang both countrys flags on telephone polls for two week before the wall arrived. The City Council denied that. The President of the Vietnamese Pilots Association did a fly over in his Cessna. [He is quoted in the paper today as saying the purpose for the event is the same each year - to educate Vietnamese youth to petition for democracy SO THAT SOME DAY THEY MIGHT RETURN HOME (I added the Capitals). "We are all here temporarily" said Chi Huynh, the pilot.]

So much for my theory of assimilation. Much more for my feeling of anger.

As I drove away, the Blue Angels roared over me. It was also the last day of the El Toro Marine Base Air Show. Biggest crowds ever, almost one million a day. You see a lot of young men, women, mostly white out on those hot runways. You do not see many Vietnamese at the Air Show. I can think of many reasons. I pulled off the road and watched, the soaring beauty of flight. I felt patriotic, as strange as that may sound, I felt American. The voices I heard were speaking words that I understood. I smelled beer and hot dogs, familiar things. Not foreign sounds and smells, and small people who kept staring at me.

So, If I followed the reasoning of Mr. Huynh, he is here to learn democracy, feed at the well of knowledge, get what he can from America, and take it back and build a Viet Nam that is a Democracy. I doubt that will ever happen. As I stood at the wall, silently and alone, reading names, and imagining how big the real wall must me, I was alone. Alone with my feelings, and alone in the midst of a culture that didn't speak to me, didn't acknowledge my presence, and seems, is just here for "awhile". There were White Americans, Brown Americans, and a few Black Americans at the wall. There were also many Vietnamese. What there wasn't was much interaction, or dialogue between the Vietnamese, and the others. And this was in Little Saigon.

I drove away feeling like I was a stranger in a strange land, and wondered: Is this what all those names died for?

I am still "processing" what I saw and felt, and will answer the above posts later. (Betty, you must be telapathic)

later

doc spatz

-- Shrink4u@irvine.quik.com (Barry 'doc' Spatz)