VIETNAM VETS: WALL BROUGHT FIRST HEALING

Twenty years after the fall of South Vietnam, area veterans of the longest war in U.S. history say healing has begun, but at a pace tempered by the memory of 58,151 Americans killed.

For many, the 20th anniversary of the day North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon is less a reminder of the era than is the week in April 1989 when Cape Girardeau hosted the Moving Wall, a half-scale traveling replica of the black granite Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C.

It was then that many Vietnam vets say internal wounds began to heal.

Before the wall, the war was rarely discussed. Vietnam vets working at area manufacturing plants were unaware of the dozens of others vets who worked beside them, each maintaining silent vigilance against the memories they couldn't shake.

Ron MacCubbin of Jackson, a Marine who spent 30 months in the war, said the Moving Wall changed that.

"Up until the wall came in 1989 no one ever talked about it," he said. "I went to the Moving Wall basically out of curiosity. That's when the wounds opened back up, and the healing started."

Roy Rhodes spent 1966-67 in the war, and headed a group of Vietnam veterans that coalesced when the Moving Wall came.

"I know that's when my healing started," Owens said. "I know that for a fact."

Morris Owens, an infantry sergeant who spent his tour in Vietnam in a river force in the Mekong Delta, said he had no idea there were so many compatriots in Cape Girardeau.

An employee of Procter and Gamble, Owens said that before he visited the Moving Wall, he knew only a handful of veterans at work. At the wall, he found more than 100 co-workers also paying their respects to those with whom they served.

"We all spent the week there while it was here, took off from work, and just sat and talked," added MacCubbin.

The bonds that formed helped many veterans finally come to grips with their feelings about the war.

For the first time ever, Owens, Rhodes and MacCubbins were able to discuss Vietnam and their shared view that the conflict quickly became unwinnable as it was conducted from Washington.

"If the generals in the field could have fought it and not the politicians in Washington, it would have been a different story," MacCubbin said. "I'm angry at a lot things -- that we lost so many lives when we knew we couldn't win, that we lost 58,000 warriors, and that another 200,000 committed suicide after the war."

Rhodes, who enlisted in 1961 at age 17, called the government's handling of the war "a disgrace.

"There was a lot of policy I didn't agree with, but it was still my duty to serve," he said.

Rhodes' frustration has boiled anew with the publication of former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara's book about the war. In the book, McNamara concedes that before U.S. casualties began to mount he believed the war was unwinnable.

"Unfortunately, the man who had the power to change the course of the war did not," Rhodes said. "At that time, we had 7,000 casualties. In my opinion, he has the blood of 51,000 warriors on his hands."