When I returned home from Vietnam, I still had a year and
several months to serve in the Army before being released from active duty.
Most of the guys who served with me at Fort Hood, Texas were also Vietnam veterans. We worked with each other every day and on
week-ends, we ate and drank together, but rarely did we mention our Vietnam
experience. We were ready to leave that experience behind and move forward into
our bright future. Our emotions were bottled up inside. We didn’t realize how
changed we were, and how hard it was going to be to fit back in to American
society. 
In the summer of 1969, I took a couple of weeks leave and
drove from Fort Hood to Louisville, Ky. where my parents were living. My family
was from St. Louis, but while I was in Vietnam, they moved to Louisville, where
my dad had accepted a job. I didn’t know the area and had no friends there. Most
of my time was spent hanging out in their condo, watching tv.
They
subscribed to Life magazine and the new issue came while I was there. On the
cover was a giant picture of the face of a Vietnam soldier. Next to the Life
logo the title read, “The Faces of the American Dead in Vietnam, One Week’s
Toll.”
Inside were 242 faces, all soldiers who had died in that
one-week period of the war. I examined every face. Each one deserved my full
attention. Part way through, I had to set the magazine aside. My blocked
emotions finally erupted like a volcano. I finished reverently examining each
face and when my parents came home from work, I was emotionally spent and exhausted.
My mom asked me how my day went, I said, “Fine.”
How could they understand what I was going through, I
didn’t understand it myself.
From the June 27, 1969, issue of
LIFE:
The faces shown on the next pages
are the faces of American men killed—in the words of the official announcement
of their deaths—"in connection with the conflict in Vietnam." The
names, 242 of them, were released on May 28 through June 3 [1969], a span of no
special significance except that it includes Memorial Day. The numbers of the
dead are average for any seven-day period during this stage of the war.
It is not the intention of this
article to speak for the dead. We cannot tell with any precision what they
thought of the political currents which drew them across the world. From the
letters of some, it is possible to tell they felt strongly that they should be
in Vietnam, that they had great sympathy for the Vietnamese people and were
appalled at their enormous suffering. Some had voluntarily extended their tours
of combat duty; some were desperate to come home. Their families provided most
of these photographs, and many expressed their own feelings that their sons and
husbands died in a necessary cause. Yet in a time when the numbers of Americans
killed in this war—36,000—though far less than the Vietnamese losses, have
exceeded the dead in the Korean War, when the nation continues week after week
to be numbed by a three-digit statistic which is translated to direct anguish
in hundreds of homes all over the country, we must pause to look into the
faces. More than we must know how many, we must know who. The faces of one
week's dead, unknown but to families and friends, are suddenly recognized by
all in this gallery of young American eyes.
