March 29th is Vietnam Veterans Day. It marks the day the last American combat troops were finally withdrawn from Vietnam, forty years ago.
Well, not all of them. 1600 troops are still officially missing in Vietnam.
I grew up with Vietnam hanging over my family. My grandmother was a Gold Star Mother, which is what the government calls you when you’ve lost a child in war. She never rode in the Veterans Day parades on that sad float with all the other mothers in Belmont, Massachusetts (not Mitt Romney’s side of town) who had lost their sons. But Uncle Allan’s name is etched in granite in the town square.
My uncle, Allan John Eastman, was born in 1950. My grandmother and mother always spoke of him as a good boy, a saint. But there were stories. He famously ‘borrowed’ an MTA bus left idling by a driver who stopped for a break and took it for a joyride up Trapelo Road towards Watertown, taking off down the side streets before the cops could catch him. Every time I ride the #71 bus out of Harvard Square, I imagine him giggling his ass off, running for home.
He enlisted in the Army and was sent out.
Uncle Allan was shot and died of malaria on November 9, 1969. He was 19.
I finally got to Washington to see Uncle Allan’s name on The Vietnam Veterans Memorial a few years ago. If you’ve never seen The Wall, it’s extraordinary. It’s sweeping and dark and seems to go on forever, like that war did. There are 58,272 names engraved in the black granite. It seems impossible to find the person you’re looking for, but there are people there to help. Uncle Allan’s name is on Panel 16W, Row 50.
I touched his name, and told Uncle Allan I hoped he knew there were still people who remembered him.
“Jesus,” said the man who helped me find him. “To go all that way, and die at 19.”
