My name is Anita Helbach. I'm married to Vietnam Veteran.

When I was young I never gave much thought to Vietnam--where it was, what it was about, much less our governments' involvement in that country. When my eyes stumbled across the nightly news of the Vietnam conflict my response was hummmm…not a disbelieving hummm, or an outraged hummm, just hummm. Then in December of 1968 I met Paul.

Ours was an instant friendship. He was after all there to visit my roommate Clare. They had a relationship for years. Paul was on his way to Camp Pendelton for conditioning and then on to Vietnam. He had stopped in to say goodbye.

Vietnam was now significant to me. It was the place where this cute boy I had just met was. We wrote frequent letters and our friendship grew. Vietnam became an annoyance. Vietnam was an annoying distance away. Paul did return. Our friendship grew into love. We married.

Time passed. Paul became involved in veteran issues. I was tolerant but was thinking "get over this guys, it's been 15 years".

Then in 1984 we went to Washington D.C. to attend the dedication of the Vietnam Statue. There were thousands and thousands of people there. Yet it was the reverent silence that was deafening to me.

We approached the Memorial Wall from the back, giving no hint of what we were to see. We turned the corner of the low end of the Wall. What happened to me next was surreal. In an instant, an instant that's lasting an eternity, all those names, all those horizontal names transformed into vertical men, boys, sons. They were walking towards me, smiling with their eyes, waving hello. And in that same instant, they were blown to pieces before my eyes. In that instant Vietnam broke my safe fence of indifferent denial, broke into my level of conscious comprehension, spilled into my soul and broke my heart. Vietnam was now more than an inconvenient place. It was the event that someone I love very much had to endure. It was a place were the American sons and daughters had the most sweetest, fragile, corner of their souls shattered.

So on this Memorial Day I'd like to dedicate this song to Paul, my husband, my life, also to the sons and daughters that returned from Vietnam, those that didn't, and to the people who loved both.