Blog
Memorial Day
Posted by • May 25, 2015
“One of the things that Vietnam taught me, and the reporting I did subsequently after the war, was that wars don`t end. They come home, and it`s the women and the children who fight them.
There is a war to find beauty and meaning in life again. There is sometimes a war to learn how to pick up a fork, how to tie a shoe, how to reconnect with a world that sent you to do something you never really thought you were going to do. And the aftermath of war is something that is profound.
And I think — while, we didn’t recognize the soldiers enough after Vietnam, I think one of the outrages was we blamed the war on the people who fought and we in time learned to separate the warriors from the war.
Now sometimes you come home from war and you get a Super Bowl ticket or you get parades, but you still should not have to wait ten months to get mental health support at a V.A. And I think there is a tremendous amount of work that still needs to be done to help people make it home from the war.”
–Chaplain and former correspondent Laura Palmer on Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer, CBS News, Memorial Day weekend 2015. Ms. Palmer covered the war in Vietnam from 1972 to 1974, and was evacuated by helicopter as the South Vietnamese regime collapsed in 1975. She is the author of Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
