Today’s edition of The Berkshire Eagle, our hometown daily paper, carried the following editorial, headed “Vietnam reverberates half a century later”:

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On Memorial Day, when we remember all those who died while serving in the country’s armed forces, the Vietnam War has particular resonance. Fifty years ago, a war that had been simmering in the public consciousness fully exploded, with consequences both societal and political. The aftershocks are still being felt half a century later.

Nearly 15,000 Americans died in Vietnam in 1968, a 57 percent increase over 1967, and an increasingly rebellious press and public questioned the rationale for the war and the reliability of what they were being told about the war by the political and military hierarchy. 1968 was also the year of the Tet offensive, a coordinated wave of assaults launched by North Vietnam. While nominally a victory for the United States and its South Vietnam allies, the ferocity of the attack shattered the illusion created by the hierarchy that the war was being won and would soon be over. It would not be over soon, and victory was far from assured.

In March of this year, the 27 Berkshire County veterans who died in Vietnam were honored at an event sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans of America, Chapter 65. One of those soldiers, Paul Cronk Jr. of Ashley Falls, received the Medal of Liberty this past Thursday in a ceremony on the campus of Mount Everett High School in Sheffield (Eagle, May 26.) The U.S. Army specialist fourth class was killed in action in late 1967 in the Battle of Dak To.

Bob Cronk, A Navy veteran who was presented his older brother’s medal at the ceremony, observed that the 1958 Thunderbird that Paul Jr. was restoring when he left for Vietnam remains parked in his driveway 50 years later. Those who died in Vietnam had lives that were frozen in time when they were lost on the battlefield. And those lives remain fresh in the memory of those they left behind, in part because of the objects, like a partly restored Thunderbird, that remain to represent them.

The reaction of Americans to returning veterans was complicated by growing opposition to the war. Those who went to Vietnam were criticized as enablers of the misguided policies of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Army Commander William Westmoreland and many others. The My Lai massacre of unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops in 1968 tarred all troops by implication. Vets came to home to criticism or were simply ignored, and have only in recent years been accorded recognition, including assistance in dealing with the physical and psychological wounds of war they brought home with them.

The lessons of Vietnam were many, and perhaps foremost among them were that wars should be fought only as a last resort, and never under false pretenses. The Iraq War under President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney showed that those lessons went unlearned — or were cynically ignored. As in Vietnam, politics tainted the rationale for war, and the public was lied to as that rationale crumbled among bloodshed and chaos. Those who fought bravely in Iraq, and in the ongoing war in Afghanistan as well, merit respect regardless of the failings of the politicians and the military brass. Those who have died in those wars deserve the honors accorded those who gave their lives in all of the nation’s wars through its history.

Going forward, we hope the lessons of Vietnam and Iraq have finally been learned by all Americans, and by the elected and appointed officials charged with waging war, or with finding diplomatic solutions to avoid war. Learning and applying those lessons is a ideal way to pay tribute to our veterans — those who returned from the battlefields and those who did not.

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To access the Eagle’s editorial and op-ed pages, go to http://www.berkshireeagle.com/ and select “Opinion.”

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Why the Eagle? It’s based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where we — Bruce Henry and Mark Miller — live and where we boarded one of two buses on April 12 to get us most of the way to Provincetown on Cape Cod, where the next morning we began walking toward westward to the New York State line. More detail on the walk will follow in future entries, as well as relevant entries not specifically on the walk or on the mass murders of September 11, 2001.

— Mark