Son My, Vietnam (CNN) — Two walls have brought me to tears. They are on opposite sides of the world, 8,600 miles apart. Both are filled with names of people I never knew but who have helped shaped the person I have become.
The first of those walls is the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, DC, where 140 black granite panels are etched with more than 58,000 names of US soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen killed or missing in Southeast Asia between 1956 and 1975.
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When I first visited it in the early 1990s, standing at its deepest point gouged in the DC earth, I cried for the youth and the promise lost, and at the realization that but for the randomness of birth dates (I was too young to go to Vietnam) my name could have been on that wall.
Fifty years ago this November, what happened at My Lai sprang into newspaper headlines in the US and around the world.
