THE WALL OF FACES

"An God said who shall we send.I answered I am here,send me."

Isaiah 6:8

Ar dheis De go raibh a anam

FOREVER REMEMBERED

"If you are able, save for them a place inside of you....and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the places they can no longer go.....Be not ashamed to say you loved them....
Take what they have left and what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own....And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind...."

Quote from a letter home by Maj. Michael Davis O'Donnell
KIA 24 March 1970. Distinguished Flying Cross: Shot down and Killed while attempting to rescue 8 fellow soldiers surrounded by attacking enemy forces.

We Nam Brothers pause to give a backward glance, and post this remembrance to you, one of the gentle heroes lost to the War in Vietnam:

Slip off that pack. Set it down by the crooked trail. Drop your steel pot alongside. Shed those magazine-ladened bandoliers away from your sweat-soaked shirt. Lay that silent weapon down and step out of the heat. Feel the soothing cool breeze right down to your soul ... and rest forever in the shade of our love, brother.

From your Nam-Band-Of-Brothers

Freddy Dean Dodson is at rest in a cemetery at Marshall, Texas. His parents have now joined him there. I recall the day he was buried, when after the services I walked back up the hill with his father who was my brother. Although I was an Air Force pilot at the time, I was at loss for words that could offer my brother any measure of comfort in the midst of sorrow for the sacrifice his son had given in service of his country. The most difficult thing for them, his parents, was the belief that his death was unnecessary and unjustified.

The ignominous way the war ended several years later gives further credence to their belief. However ignoble the actions of those whose policies and political decisions insured our defeat in Vietnam, they cannot diminish the heroic sacrifice of Freddy Dean and his comrades in arms.

"Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die."

G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) "Orthodoxy" ch 6 (1909)

Richard Boyd Dodson
Major USAF Retired

Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

Mary Frye – 1932