THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 23, 1995 TAG: 9504230023
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
Will the Vietnam War always be with us?
Grainy and herky-jerky, it was the first war to come into our living rooms on TV. Helicopters whirling. Men running through the jungle. Bloodied bodies hustled out on stretchers.
Now, like an unwelcome guest, the war won't go away.
Clearly, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara is still fighting Vietnam battles.
His recent declaration that the war was a mistake hit this nation's psyche like a mortar slamming into a jungle floor.
In three words - ``wrong, terribly wrong'' - he stirred up a swamp of feelings that has churned beneath the surface for three decades. Feelings that, like hidden enemies that keep returning, cannot be eradicated: Doubt. Uncertainty. Guilt. Bitterness. Fear. Sorrow. Anger. Confusion.
It is all surfacing again through mounds of scar tissue.
You have to ask, ``Why now?''
McNamara's book is less about teaching war lessons - they have already been learned - and more about seeking atonement,which doesn't exist.
For McNamara it is a war without end.
For Billy Silvia, on the other hand, the war ended years ago.
It ended one brutal day in July 1967 when a mortar shell tore open his bronchial tube. He believed he was fighting for a just cause; he had written his parents a letter saying so.
His mother, Aline Silvia, remembers like yesterday the day she looked out her window and saw the Army officers approaching her porch with the news.
As her husband shouted for her not to come out, she ran for the back door.
``I didn't know where I was going. I just knew I didn't want to hear it.''
The same feeling passed over her when she sat in her Chesapeake apartment and read a story about McNamara saying the Vietnam War had been wrong.
She wanted to run. Instead she cried. For two days. And then she sat down to pen McNamara a letter.
``Dear Mr. McNamara,'' she wrote in careful script. ``My heart was broken on a fateful day in July of 1967. My heart is broken on another fateful day in April of 1995 to finally hear our government killed the 58,000 plus fine young men and women who gave their all for what they thought was a just and honorable cause.''
Silvia feels cheated. Cheated out of a son. Cheated out of seeing him become a husband or a father. Cheated out of the comfort an only son offers a mother.
And now, cheated out of a just and noble cause.
Because the war never ended for Silvia either. She still wears a POW bracelet with the name of a captain whose status she has never had the courage to determine. She keeps a scrapbook with pictures of her handsome, dark-haired son, and letters and telegrams that have been read a hundred times and then some.
Whenever she meets someone who served in Vietnam, she gives him a hug and says, ``Welcome home'' - even though he has been back for decades.
Her gesture goes a lot further toward healing than does McNamara's clinical analysis of the rights and wrongs of war-room decisions. His book neither explains his actions nor frees his soul.
Instead, he is running for the back door.
Aline Silvia can tell him there is no way out. by CNB