A veterans view of Deltona's Veterans Memorial Park
The following letter was sent to me by Red Burdett. In my opinion he has verbalized quite succinctly what we all feel as Veterans when we work to build a world class Veterans Memorial Park. Red will be one of the guest speakers at the Memorial Day Dedication Ceremony for the Vietnam War Memorial.
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Morning Moses
I think people need to understand and feel that this park is for all veterans and will serve as a memorial, educational and information center to the community at large rather than a glorification of war. I believe most people understand and know what our memorials are. Yet there are those people, whom try to under mine our way of life and distort our participation in efforts to aid others around the world to be able to live in peace who turn this type of effort into a political, tool used for a platform from which to advance there own agendas and rhetoric .
Mose if I believed anything else I would stop calling myself a veteran. I want everyone to know from the beginning that this memorial is for them, their children and the families of veterans past and present, who stood for good against those who stood against it. A tribute to the everlasting optimism that America and Americans wish not to take over the world but to live in the world, not harm the world but to rather enjoin the world that we might all one day live in peace and harmony. That our neighbors of the world community might not have to escape to America to find that peace and harmony or that their children can go to sleep with out the fear of gun fire or bomb blasts. That they might rise every morning to the same quiet contentment our children do, that they might know not hunger, but health and well being, through the simple inalienable rights we have come to know understand and often take for granted, life, liberty and justice for all. And do it all in their own homes and their own countries celebrating their own heritage and ancestry. Is this not the vision our young men and women fight and sacrifice for, is it not what we believed what we were fighting for in South East Asia?
I know this sounds so naive and simplistic but in the last several days since I participated in the run for a downed brother and his family, on returning home I learned I had been contacted by some of the men I served in Vietnam with, for the first time in 38 years! I got to talk with some of the people I actually knew and lived with, fought with, was scared with and bled with. Within each conversation we discussed why, for whom and about the actual people we fought for. We each and every one of us had a story about the kids there and how they became friends. How we all wished they had not had to experience what was going on. The ugliness, the pain, the smell of it all. Mans inability to escape the shackles of anger and hatred, politics and the egotistical arrogance which kept both sides from working out a communication, flexible and pliable enough to settle their differences with words and compassion rather than bullets and passion.
Moses if we do this right we will create a place where people can come to celebrate living while honoring those who gave that others might know what we have and enjoy every day.
People don't leave their homes in other places on inner tubes, old wooden boats or on rafts, risking their lives on vast oceans and almost certain death, to live in Afghanistan, Iraq, Russia, Ireland, France or China. They choose not to cross the hostile terrain of Mexico's desert, wade through a river, get beat up robbed by their own kind and or give what amounts to their life savings to find their serenity and a new life in Old Mexico, central or south America no, they don't. They choose to come here, to the United States of America, just so they might raise there children in peace. Without the fear of war and hatred.
We can not let those who for their own political agendas and who take what we have for granted undermine the efforts of our young brothers and sisters go unappreciated, unacknowledged and or in vain.We have to let all those coming home know that we who went before them will not let them down. I having known all that I have spoke of, life, liberty, the pain and smell of battle and having watched my children grow and prosper in such a place as our home, these United States of America, wish to help you who have brought this memorial park, and now, this museum, to life, come to fruition that they who now sacrifice for others and return home will know we are there for them. Thank You and the Brothers and Sisters who have joined with other Veterans and Community leaders to bring this to life.
Semper Fi