In Abilene we are in the 2nd day of the Vietnam Wall experience. I began working with a grassroots committee to bring the Wall here, we are one of 2 places the traveling wall will be in Texas. Over 30 people have worked tirelessly to get this event to Abilene and make it a success and looking at the crowd today I would say its a huge success. The wall is a 1/5th size replica of the one in DC and has all Vietnam War casualties on it over 58,000 names etched in the granite wall, today people lined up to scratch a relief of their loved on on a small piece of paper.
As a young boy the Vietnam war was so foreign to me. I used to watch my grandfather (Benjamin Winslow Hillis) watch the evening news with Walter Cronkite. Seeing the war report was puzzling. Until one day my dad & I caught a huge Yellow Catfish and I had my picture in the local paper holding this big fish. I was 8 yrs old. A Uvalde Leader News made it to Vietnam and a soldier read about me and wrote me a letter saying that he loved the photo of the fish and when he returned on leave he wanted to meet me. To an 8 year old a visit from a US soldier was just about as big as it gets. And one day this fully decorated US soldier came by to meet me, I was on cloud nine. He wanted to hear a fish story and I wanted to hear war stories.
Vietnam was a wound and is a wound but thanks to events like this the wounds are healing.
I'm grateful for those men who when called served!