Reading The Wall on Veterans' Day

Since I am fairly well known in my community as "public veteran", i.e., I appear at a lot of functions and events wearing my Vietnam Veteran ball cap, I was asked to help a local grade school with their Veteran's Day celebration.

"I'll need to check with my parole officer first," was my first response. It was followed by a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the phone.

"I'm just kidding," I added quickly. "So what will I need to do?"

"Just read something to one of our classes. We have kindergarten, 3rd grade and 5th grade classes available for you to volunteer in."

A moment's thought. "Jeez, kindergartners are messy and smelly and have the attention span of a gnat, and fifth graders these days are already hitting puberty and some of them may be packing heat. I'll take the third graders."

Which is what I got. When I showed up at the Garfield School they gave me my reading material, a children's book called The Wall, by Eve Bunting and illustrated by Ronald Himler(!). When I first heard the title, I was expecting maybe an abridged version of John Hersey's great book about the Warsaw Ghetto, The Wall, which I thought might be a little age-inappropriate for ten-year-olds.

But no, to my surprise, it was a book about a young boy's visit to the Vietnam Veterans Wall in Washington DC with his father to look for his grandfather's name.

It was actually a very moving book and I could hardly keep myself from choking up a couple of times while reading it. If you know children about that age, I highly recommend that you get it for them. As I say, it was a very moving story and a great introduction for children to the concept of the Vietnam War.

The kids were great, each and every one of them was quiet and well-behaved, and either really interested in what I was reading or making a great face of looking that way. Afterwards they came up and asked a bunch of ten-year-old questions. At that age they can be fairly blunt: "Did you kill anyone?" No. "Did you have friends who died and are on the Wall?" Yes, about a dozen of them. And so on.

And then we all filed out of the classroom and down what seemed to me to be a tiny hall -- it was constructed for gradeschoolers after all -- to the gym, where I joined up with about a dozen more veterans who had volunteered for an assembly where we were all honored and thanked for our service.

It was really nice, a really sweet thing to do, and I was happy to be able to do it. Now I thinking of volunteering more at the school, since everyone knows that the public schools need our help. If you ever get a chance to do something like this, go for it. You will surprise yourself at what happens when you do.