This year, I have attended several funerals for young sons of Connecticut killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve also been at an especially poignant service for a Connecticut serviceman only recently found and returned to rest from Vietnam. I’ve thought about these events a lot while reading Ron Winter’s recollections of his wartime service in Vietnam and its lasting presence in his life.
I got to know Ron Winter because we share a commitment to do better by our combat veterans now than we did during and after Vietnam. We also share the generation of Vietnam – he a Marine combat veteran and me spared by the luck of the draft lottery. We would not have agreed much then about that war and probably not today either. He fought, believing it to be his patriotic duty. I protested, believing it to be my patriotic duty. But then and now, we both have no doubt about the honor and sacrifice of those who serve.
Ron writes of war as a life experience, for all its death and destruction. It’s his life to be sure, but also the lives of so many others during those days of uncertain purpose but certain valor. For all whose young adulthood was lived in the red glare of the Vietnam War, it will always seem like just yesterday. Yet, for those younger who I sometimes teach, places like Da Nang and Quang Tri are as remote as ancient history. So Ron Winter’s story is an often moving “grunt’s eye” view, welcome paean to a generation of patriots still too lost in history, and timely reminder that wars may be right or wrong but those who serve are never without honor.
Ron even provides the perfect metaphor for his extended wartime journal and the times: “Vietnam seemed to be inordinately dark at night, and it took a full moon to give any kind of decent illumination. But I had developed excellent night vision, so I could make out a lot of details….But this was no movie, and celluloid heroes aren’t real. This was war. There was no director, and no one to yell ‘cut’ when things didn’t go right. When the heroes died, it was for real, and forever.”
Masters of the Art is that “full moon” for those of us with less night vision than Ron Winter and a need to make out more of the details.
Kevin Sullivan
Lieutenant Governor
State of Connecticut