November 20th Letter To the Editor

Dear Editor,

In response to the recent article “UWT honors Washington’s Vietnam veterans,” I feel that the gesture of planting flags has morphed into a gross failure of symbolism and remembrance. As a veteran student at UWT, I received an email from Rosalynn Johnson a few weeks ago seeking volunteers to plant flags in remembrance of those lost during the Vietnam Conflict from Washington State. Although my schedule prohibited me from volunteering, I asked that some gesture be made to recognize the millions of Vietnamese who perished during the conflict and to, by proxy, acknowledge the students on our campus whose families were directly affected by the conflict. Specifically, I expressed my fear that “the gesture of only acknowledging those who fell on our side can and has led to a form of hero worship where questionable moral and political motivations become effaced and forgotten in our rush to aggrandize the sacrifice of the fallen.” It seems to me that this fear has been realized. This is exemplified by the fact that a student who was interviewed for the article should get a “little warm and fuzzy” in their heart when viewing flags which represent thousands of dead persons; especially while millions more dead go unmentioned.

-Christopher Wu.