All They Left Behind: Legacies of the Men and Women on The Wall
by Lisa A. Lark, M.T. Publishing Company, 2012
A question posed by a student on Memorial Day 2010, requesting more information on a particular soldier whose name is on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, turned into a major project for Lisa Lark, a Dearborn, Mich., teacher. “For me,” she writes in the foreword of All They Left Behind,“each of the 58,282 engraved names represents a life lost, a future cut too short…and a legacy that all too often remains unwritten.” Her research and interviews ultimately produced profiles of 68 lives, which she compiled in time for publication on the 30th anniversary of the memorial’s dedication.
Deaths in combat, some heroic enough to warrant a posthumous Medal of Honor, occurred frequently in Indochina. But so did deaths of perhaps a more tragic nature, including air crashes, too often due to malfunctions, and“misadventures”(what today we’d call “friendly fire”). James T. Lockridge was murdered in a dance hall by South Vietnamese soldiers whose identities remain a mystery, and 2nd Lt. Pamela D. Donavan’s death was attributed to“pneumonia caused by a barbiturate overdose.”
All They Left Behind is meant as a companion to M.T. Publishing’s The Wall: 25 Years of Healing and Educating, by Kim Murphy, which came out in 2007 for the memorial’s 25th anniversary. The book will undoubtedly have a special resonance for Vietnam veterans and their families. For others, its collection of life stories may have a more universal meaning applicable to any casualties of war, as well expressed by British WWI ace Cecil A. Lewis after learning of the death in action of one of his squadron mates, Arthur P.F. Rhys-Davids:
“Was this boy the hero of half a hundred fights? I could not reconcile the strange division, till one day, when I had praised him, he shrugged his shoulders; it was our job, he said, we ought to try to do it well, but when peace came we would do better. When peace came! I hope the gunner of that Hun two-seater shot him clean, bullet to heart, and that his plane, on fire, fell like a meteor through the sky he loved. Since he had to end, I hope he ended so. But oh, the waste! The loss!”
Originally published in the December 2013 issue of Vietnam. To subscribe, click here.
