Il Muro di Berlino. Il Muro del pianto. Il Muro della vergogna (ce ne sono tanti: l’ultimo they pulled up in Israel). The Great Wall of China ... Washington also has its wall with a capital M. And the following are some stories by the Wall in Washington.
Dan Bullock was a black child of Goldsboro, North Carolina. It is said that he was a quiet kid. At eleven he lost his mother. Dad remarried and took Dan and his sister to live up north in Brooklyn, New York, 279 Lee Avenue. At the young age Dan did not like the metropolis. Held out for a while ', then one day he falsified the date on his birth certificate and was able to enlist in the Marines. It was September 18 1968: Dan aveva poco più di quattordici anni e mezzo.
Lo sbarcarono in Vietnam il diciotto maggio del ’69, una domenica. Venti giorni più tardi, il sette giugno, il Private First Class (soldato di prima classe) Dan Bullock veniva falciato da una raffica di proiettili durante un attacco Viet Cong alla base di An Hoa, provincia di Quang Nam. Aveva quindici anni, cinque mesi e diciassette giorni: la più giovane vittima americana della guerra del Vietnam.
Oggi il suo nome sta scolpito su una lapide al cimitero di Greensboro, North Carolina. E sta scritto su un cartello stradale lungo il Lee Boulevard di Brooklyn, l’odiato domicilio da cui era fuggito per diventare un Marine: have dedicated a piece of that street. It is engraved in black granite - plate number 23W, 96th row - the monument to the fallen of Vietnam, in downtown Washington, which officially is called the Vietnam Veterans Memorial here but everyone knows simply as The Wall, The Wall .
All around Dan Bullock, on the Wall are the names of the other 58'255 U.S. soldiers died in the longest, unfortunate and tragic military campaign fought in the framework of the so-called Cold War, in the name of the Free World and interests government in Washington. That in Indochina after squandering $ 650 billion in the construction of the wall (or better: in the excavation of the Wall, but this will be clarified later) did not have to invest a single penny. That wall, at first criticized, ridiculed and opposed, later became the most famous monument of the United States, visited every year by almost four million people.
Jan Scruggs - a young man from Bowie, Maryland - had been in Vietnam, a corporal in 199esima brigade of light infantry. He had been wounded - as other three hundred thousand of his comrades - he was healed, he had also earned a medal for bravery, and had finally brought home the skin. But even though it was then immersed studies at the American University in Washington, Vietnam did not mind coming out and guts. Scruggs was convinced that his fallen comrades, however, deserved a monument, even though that war had led to the most humiliating military defeat in the history of the country.
In May of '79, since the theme of the monument, Congress was silent, Jan Scruggs threw a fundraiser for the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: the first 2,800 U.S. dollars put them there himself, out of pocket her. Nearly three hundred thousand Americans responded to his call, and soon Scruggs bunches more than eight million dollars. Now the money was, lacked only a worthy project. October 80 was announced the competition.
Maya Ying Lin was born in '59 in Athens, a university town in the deep Ohio, the daughter of a pair of Chinese fled the mainland just before the communist revolution del'49 that would bring to power " Great Helmsman "Mao Tse-Tung. His mother, poet, and his father, a potter, had found employment as teachers in the local Ohio University. Maya could instead obtain admission to the architecture faculty of the prestigious Yale University - the same attended by Bush in every generation.
During his senior year at Yale, in a seminar on funeral monuments, Maya Lin was forced to participate in the competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial .
Maya gave birth to a humble and revolutionary project: no classical figure that rises to the sky, nothing more or less veiled celebration or display, no exaltation of human sacrifice in the name of the country, not even a flag in the wind. Only one trench and a wall: a huge wound in the land, more or less triangular shape, sweet and bordered on one side - on both sides that plunge vertically into the ground - by a wall made of granite slabs, in turn supported a simple path along which let it slide, walk, read and touch the names of fallen soldiers etched in stone. A wall that stands but does not sink, a wall that will not divide but unite: the dead with the living.
Among the more than 1,400 sketches submitted to the competition, all submitted anonymously, the jury unanimously chose the design number 1026. Corresponding to the opening of the envelope, was the huge surprise when it was revealed the identity of the author: Maya Ying Lin, twenty, a student. Now the controversy flared up.
His name sounded too Asia: not by chance a Vietnamese? And the Memorial who claimed to sink in the grass in the damp earth at the center of Washington, did not know too much defeatism? And the absence of the glorious stars and stripes irritated, offended, desecrate the sacrifices of the fallen - supported by many. A group of veterans offered to throw everything overboard and start over. James Watt, then Secretary to the interior of the Reagan administration, refused to grant a building permit, due to lack of evidence or patriotic symbols. It was necessary to arrive at a compromise: the Wall of Maya Lin was supported, not far from a classic bronze depicting three soldiers and regular pennant with stars and stripes in the wind.
It seems that the chorus of protests have deeply grieved the young student of Chinese origin. But time is sometimes honest: in the United States today there is no public monument the most visited of the Maya Lin wall. And there are few who will also stop in front of the bronze with three soldiers and flag ...
Albert Peter Dewey is not carved on the Wall in Washington, along with the fallen in Vietnam . Yet he died in Saigon back in September of '45, and was a U.S. Army colonel, and was even part of the OSS (l’Office of Strategic Services, agenzia oggi più comunemente nota come “CIA”). E fu il primo americano ucciso in Vietnam da una pallottola comunista. Eppure…
La storia del pluridecorato maggiore Albert Peter Dewey è singolare e un po’ grottesca, e sembra volerci segnalare che le cose avrebbero forse potuto andare diversamente. Al termine della II Guerra Mondiale Dewey era stato inviato in Vietnam per prendere contatti col Viet Minh, il movimento comunista fondato nel ’41 da Ho Chi Minh per lottare contro l’occupazione giapponese e per conquistare l’indipendenza dalla Francia. In particolare, Dewey aveva il compito di coordinare il rimpatrio di circa duecento soldati americani taken prisoner by the Japanese, used as slaves in the construction of the bridge over the River Kwai (that of the famous movie) and held in Saigon.
But in the immediate post-war Saigon was the scene of a thousand intrigues: there were the Vietnamese who yearn for independence, the French eager to re-install as a colonial power, Britain aims to weave their plots, the Americans do not you know what. And Albert Peter Dewey, sent home after the former American prisoners, fell a victim of misunderstandings caused (tragic irony) from its refined education.
Told in short, went like this: his contacts with the Viet Minh - who still hoped to discard pacificamente dei francesi grazie a negoziati e con l’aiuto degli americani – lo resero sospetto agli occhi del locale comandante britannico, che ne ordinò l’espulsione da Saigon.
Sulla strada verso l’aeroporto, la jeep del maggiore Dewey incappò in un posto di blocco Viet Minh. Contrariato, Dewey – che tra l’altro aveva una laurea in storia della Francia e un passato da giornalista a Parigi – urlò qualcosa in francese all’indirizzo dei miliziani Viet Minh. Questi lo scambiarono per un soldato francese e lo crivellarono di colpi, uccidendolo all’istante.
Seguirono mille scuse e un profondo imbarazzo da parte vietnamita. Ho Chi Minh ordinò ai suoi di scovare e recuperare il cadavere, arrivando persino a offrire un’astronomica ricompensa a chi avesse riportato il corpo di Dewey. Che non fu mai rintracciato.
Ma gli USA non erano in guerra col Vietnam: ecco perché il maggiore Albert Peter Dewey, prima vittima americana di una pallottola comunista in Indocina, non sta scolpito sul Muro di Washington.
Più tardi in Vietnam tornarono i soldati francesi (quelli veri).
Poi arrivarono altri americani, inviati dal presidente Truman in aiuto ai francesi sotto l’etichetta di “assistenti e consiglieri militari”, con la precisazione che non si trattava di truppe da combattimento. Ma le distinzioni are weak, opaque boundaries, and the truth elusive. Things got complicated when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu and the luggage did. The Americans remained. As mere "military advisors", at least in theory, at least for the first time.
And so was born the typical problem of protracted hostilities, the one fought without declaring it openly - a headache for those who must write the Great Story, but also for those who are struggling with many small individual stories behind the names Wall Washington. Because the monument to the fallen of the Vietnam War are entitled to be represented, obviously, the fallen of that conflict. But who is the victim first "official"? Quando iniziò “ufficialmente” la guerra americana in Vietnam?
Il Pentagono fissa una data: il primo gennaio 1961. Ora, deposti i fucili e spento il napalm, si può accendere la battaglia delle scartoffie.
Richard Bernard Fitzgibbon Jr. , sergente dell’aviazione USA, finì scolpito nel Muro – lastra 52E, 21esima riga - solo nel ’99, diciassette anni dopo l’inaugurazione del Vietnam Veterans Memorial. E solo dopo che il Pentagono ebbe corretto e riscritto la Storia, e spostato al 1° novembre del ‘55 l’inizio “ufficiale” dell’impegno bellico statunitense in Vietnam, facendo di Richard Bernard Fitzgibbon il primo caduto americano del conflitto – o almeno: così ha deciso la burocrazia.
E se morire in guerra, comunque la si veda, è sempre un po’ assurdo, la fine di Richard Fitzgibbon Jr. è tragicamente grottesca. Ad ammazzarlo - una sera di giugno del ’56, appena tramontato il sole di Saigon – non fu un “Charlie”, un vietnamita comunista, bensì cinque pallottole americane sparategli dopo un alterco da un suo commilitone impazzito.
E se ora qualcuno dovesse pensare che all’anima del defunto sergente Fitzgibbon in fondo non gliene fregava niente dell’iscrizione on the Wall, just a detail to make you change your mind, because on the granite Memorial Fitzgibbon dad could meet with his son Richard Fitzgibbon III , a corporal in the Marines, killed in Vietnam in September of '65 and carved in granite the 77th row of the plate 2E of the Wall in Washington.
Just as has happened to Leo Claude Hester and his son Leo Hester Jr. Claude, who shared the same name, the same body (aviation) and the same fate: both died in Vietnam in the crash of their aircraft. Before and after his father's son, fortunately.
I think Nixon's mother, a woman in Arkansas Mulberry, which I do not know the name but I guess the black despair when he went to inform the army put the death of his son Samuel Ray Nixon (killed March 21) and returned a few days later to announce the loss of a second son, William Dale Nixon (who died May 8).
In 1968, the same year that another Nixon (Richard) could get elected to the White House.
addition to Samuel and William, on the wall are written the names of other Nixon eight killed in Vietnam. Everyone knows what purpose the other hand touched the Nixon president forced to resign following the Watergate scandal, but then immediately pardoned by his successor.
For the highly decorated sergeant Dan Jacob "JJ" Dones the Vietnam War was only one chapter of history to study at school. And then during military training.
Dones was born March 5 to 84 Dimmitt, Texas. soon graduated to the local High School, had enlisted in the Army in 2002. Perhaps out of conviction, perhaps by chance or by necessity, be a father or perhaps because, at that age, era troppo difficile - J.J. Dones aveva già una figlia. Più tardi sua sorella Priscilla lo aveva imitato, ma invece dell’esercito lei aveva scelto i marines: tra i due erano nate rivalità a non finire.
Il venti ottobre del 2005 J.J. Dones è morto in Irak, colpito durante un attacco alla sua base. Se mai un giorno dovessero erigere un altro Muro anche per quest’ultima folle guerra, con sopra tutti i caduti scolpiti o in rilievo, andrei a cercare il sergente Dones: un nome ci accomuna. Per ora gli hanno dedicato l’ufficio postale di Dimmitt, Texas. Popolazione: 4'375.
(© VASCO DONES;
published in the weekly Swiss ACTION summer 2007)
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