The sun was streaming in the car window.  I thought it must be at least 70 degrees, and it was only March.  I couldn’t believe I was in the car with my mother, going to some museum about a war that was fought when she was a kid.  What did that have to do with me?  I had so many more important things to be doing.  I thought to myself.  What a waste of a day.  Why did I have to apply for this scholarship anyway?  Surely there were other ones that I could apply for at a more convenient time.  Suddenly my attitude turned a switch, as my mother berated me for my lack of sheer enthusiasm.  “It might be nice if you tried to learn something about people who died so you could continue living the privileged life you lead”.  The bottom line was, I was there and I knew that nothing I said was going to change my mother’s mind.  We parked the car and went in the educational center. There were many things that looked familiar to me on the wall; pictures I had seen in textbooks.  I was drawn immediately to the letters, certainly something I could relate to.  Seeing soldiers’ own words writing on paper to loved ones made the war seem more real.  Seeing the handwriting of one young man, scrawled in a desperate and panicked plea for his girlfriend back home to forgive him for what he was doing.  I could feel his discomfort and shame.  He was trying to hold on to his humanity, and a little bit of home.  He was so certain that he would lose his girl when he explained to her how scared he was, but he had to tell her how he felt.  I thought about what the war must have been like for this soldier, a boy when he went to war, maybe on a couple of years older than me, sitting in a merciless jungle, alone at night, so homesick, and so scared.  His words seems so real to me.  I could hardly manage to pull myself away from that spot when my mother called for me…”Hey,” abruptly breaking my concentration, I turned my attention towards what she was showing me.  Being a history teacher, she had already been to the center before when she had taken her class.  “You have to come here and see these filmed interviews”.  I sat quietly, still pondering my last experience.  These people do look like they are my mother’s age.  I listen to a woman.  She can barely speak the words of her story of a Saturday morning of cartoon watching, broken by a visit to her home.  Two officers, and then her father, a big man, falls to his knees.  I am quiet.  Mom is crying.  I can tell she is wiping tears away.  This was that seemed so unreal, so far away, now seems real…A woman, whose children are sick when her husband left for war, did not see him off.  She explained through a tough barrier of years of resisting the pain of her loss that she had never dreamt it would be the last time she would ever see him.  That could be me.  I could feel myself in her place, feeling the horror she has to live with.  All these stories, told by people, just like me, just like my parents; haunting stories.  We were getting ready to go out to the memorial when the most chilling account came onto the screen.  A helicopter gunner, talking about the rush he got, shooting the enemy.  My God, I thought.  This man had become a machine.  He could not see that each of those moving creatures down below him was a person with a home and a family, maybe children.  Each person had a world that was coming to an end, and he just couldn’t see it.  I shuddered at the idea that war could really change someone into a machine…We went outside.  By this time I was nearly emotionally drained.  But when we got outside I felt the warm sun and heard the birds.  It was almost a sign of hope that life does go on, even with the horrors it endures.  My Mom walked around studying each stone.  She walked up to one stone, and she looked at it for what seemed hours.  Then she said, “December 25.  I was 18 years old, sitting at home opening Christmas presents with my family.  I was getting ready to go away to college, just like you.  I was excited about my future, and this guy was in a rice field, thousands of miles away from home, and the people he loved…dying…”  My mother is fairly crude, but she made her point.  I thought to myself, “This boy died, alone, away from everything, he has ever known…”  As that thought began to overwhelm me, I turned and saw the expanse of the wall of names.  So many names; and the stories of their deaths all had the overwhelming horror in common.

We got back into the car, and we drove for quite awhile, and neither of us said anything.  My excitement for the rest of my weekend was there, but definitely diminished.  Time seemed to have a new relevance for me.  I would still have time to be with my friends, maybe not exactly when I wanted to, but there was still a promise of a future time.  For these people who died, for their mothers, their girlfriends and wives, for their children, there was no more time.  I do not think that there is any way I could have felt the hearts and minds of all the people involved in this war any more profoundly than by experiencing what this museum has preserved for future generations.  Like the man in the documentary said, “War is the most terrible thing we can do to each other.”  I don’t think I ever could have realized this, certainly not through a textbook, without experiencing this memorial.  Thank all of you for your sacrifices.  The words that my mother had spoken to me in the car on the way to the Memorial that day, now meant something to me.  It was not just the empty words of a frantic mother…Thank you, all of you, for your sacrifices.

Lindsay Mannion, Fair Haven, NJ
Rumson Fair Haven High School