A delegation from the Dega Central Highlands Organization has been in New Mexico — at a memorial built for the men nobody thanked, at a gathering of veterans, and beside a brick in the ground that carries the Dega name.
Between 1965 and 1975, Dega soldiers fought alongside American forces in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Half a century later the people who remember that, and the people who carry it afterwards, are spread across this country. Trips like this one are how the two find each other.
Heroes never thanked
At Veterans Memorial Park in Las Cruces there is a wall of photographs of New Mexicans who went to Vietnam, with a Vietnam-era Huey mounted above it as though coming in to land. Across the top of the wall are four words that most Dega families would recognise without explanation.
Heroes never thanked. It is written for American veterans, and it is true of the Dega too.
A brick with our name on it
Among the memorial bricks there is one that does not need a paragraph after it. Someone paid for it to be cut and laid, and it is spelled the way it was laid.
Ten years, named on a brick, in a country most of those men never saw. For a people whose history is mostly unwritten and whose losses are mostly uncounted, a permanent line of text is not a small thing.
Among veterans
The rest of the trip was people. Veterans, families, and those who work on veterans’ behalf — sat down with Dega delegates and asked, and were told.
Flags in the evening
One more picture, from the end of a day: a teepee pitched on open ground with the POW/MIA flag flying beside it. Different people, a different war, the same promise about the ones who did not come home.
