Thomas Breen photo
The current Vietnam memorial on the second floor of City Hall.
The Board of Alders unanimously approved installing a new plaque commemorating post-Vietnam Era war veterans in City Hall.
The board took that vote Monday night at its regular bimonthly meeting on the second floor of City Hall.
The Board of Alders meeting on Monday night.
Morris Cove Alder and City Services and Environmental Policy (CSEP) Committee Chair Sal DeCola said the plaque will go on the empty wall space immediately adjacent to a current memorial plaque honoring Vietnam War veterans on the second floor of the building.
“This provides the city with a way of honoring our post-Vietnam Era veterans by installing a plaque adjacent to the Veterans Memorial plaque,” he said. “It is our hope to have this plaque installed soon.”
According to a packet of information about the proposed plaque submitted to the Board of Alders by DeCola in May, the plaque might read, “All gave some, some gave all”.
The site of the planned new Post-Vietnam Era plaque.
That packet also listed the 12 major U.S. military conflicts that have followed the Vietnam War, as described on the website infoplease.com.
Those include the Dominican Republic (1965), Lebanon (1982 – 1984), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), the Gulf War (1991), Somalia (1993), Bosnia (1994 – 1995), Kosovo (1999), the Global War on Terror (2001 through the present), Afghanistan (2001 – 2014), the Iraq War (2003 – 2010), and the War Against the Islamic State (2014 through the present).
Sal, maybe the plaque should read " In honor of the youth of New Haven who sacrificed their lives due to the diabolical machinations of the Military Industrial Complex" .When I look at the list of all these unnecessary wars and I think about the trillions wasted, I reflect on how so much of the suffering not just in New Haven, but throughout the county and world could be alleviated by funneling those funds to jobs, housing, education, libraries, parks, etc. Wouldn't it be a wonderful idea if our youth instead of going off to fight these illicit wars, became citizen diplomats and right after high school went to live,study, learn the culture, fall in love in places such as Russia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Grenada, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Syria, Afghanistan, and Lebanon to name a few. A seminal work I would highly recommend about US interventions is by William Blum: "Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" (revised edition 2014). Noam Chomsky called this book "far and away the best book on the topic".