Mary Anne Bell
Memorial/ Project
Freedom is imposible to explain freemdom is something you can't explain until you feel it is when you know what truely freedom is. I tasted freedom when I first got of that helicopter, my first time away from home.
At first I had no i ntrested in war, the trip was about being with the man I loved but i was so curious I quickly became completely intrested in everything I was free and I was with the man I loved but my freedom would slip away and i wanted more it was my drug.
Mark would occasionally suggest that i went home but inside of me refused to leave so I would avoid the conversation. I loved him and I loved the freedom I had, I loved and enjoyed learning new things for example equipment lessons, vietnamese words I loved shooting.
When I had stepped into the war zone, I came alive It was my drug, a high I felt like I never came down from, when you hear people talk about war it sounds like a nasty thing but for me it was beautiful in way. War made me a new person, I was happy and I felt alive. Twice I went on missions late at night, with the boys that had become brothers to me, the third time we didn't come back until the next morning all I wanted that day was to sleep but Mark was mad and he wanted me to hear what he had to say, we fought i felt guilty for worring him so I apologized, I tried to explain how Vietnam had made me feel but he would ignore it, at that point he proposed, I accepted because I loved him, so i changed to my skirt because he loved me that way, but i felt like love wasn't enough, things changed between us, he became a guard, things changed. I was no longer that girl he fell in love with and I could never go back to being that girl either, that night I left with the guys, I did things that made people scared. If I wanted you silent I would make you silent, I would cut people's tounges off and made them into a necklace, now nobody could change who I'd had become. I WAS VIETNAM AND VIETNAM WAS MARY ANNER BELL.
Poetry
Memorial
Short Personal/ Letter
Images
Qoutes and Summery
Artifacts
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This is my tounge necklace I made.
"Sometimes I want to eat this place. Vietnam. I want to swallow the whole country the dirt the death-I just want to eat and have ut there inside me. That's hpw I feel. It's like... this appetite. I get scared sometimes-lots of times- but it's not bad. You know? I feel close to myself. When I'm out there at night, I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving , my skin and my fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electicity and I'm glowing in the dark- I'm on fire almost- I'm burning away into nothing- but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am. You can't feel like that anywhere else."
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was founded by Jan Scruggs, who served in Vietnam (in the 199th Light Infantry Brigade) from 1969-1970 as a infantry corporal. He wanted the memorial to acknowledge and recognize the service and sacrifice of all who served in Vietnam. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Inc. (VVMF), a nonprofit charitable organization, was incorporated on April 27, 1979, by a group of Vietnam veterans (John Wheeler, Chairman of the Board for VVMF, served in Vietnam as a captain at U.S. Army headquarters from 1969-1970; Robert Doubek, VVMF project director, then executive director, served in Vietnam from 1968-1969 as an Air Force intelligence officer) in Washington, D.C. Jan Scruggs (President of VVMF) lobbied Congress for a two acre plot of land in the Constitution Gardens. Significant initial support came from U.S. Senators Charles McC. Mathias, Jr. (on November 8, 1979, Senator Mathias introduced legislation to authorize a site of national parkland for the Memorial) of Maryland and John W. Warner (Senator Warner launched the first significant financial contributions to the national fund raising campaign) of Virginia. On July 1, 1980, in the Rose Garden, President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation (P.L. 96-297) to provide a site in Constitution Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial. It was a three and half year task to build the memorial and to orchestrate a celebration to salute those who served in Vietnam
American Military Women who died in Vietnam War.
1st Lt. Sharon Ann Lane - On the Wall at 23W 112
Lt. Lane died from shrapnel wounds when the 312th Evac. at Chu Lai was hit by rockets on June 8, 1969. From Canton, OH, she was a month short of her 26th birthday. She was posthumously awarded the Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Palm and the Bronze Star for Heroism. In 1970, the recovery room at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, where Lt. Lane had been assigned before going to Viet Nam, was dedicated in her honor. In 1973, Aultman Hospital in Canton, OH, where Lane had attended nursing school, erected a bronze statue of Lane. The names of 110 local servicemen killed in Vietnam are on the base of the statue.
THE BEAUTY OF WAR
War at night
Has a special beauty,
There is nothing anywhere,
That can quite compare.
Perimeter flares slice/arc the black,
Then bob and slowly weave to earth
Causing shadows to dance and weave
And stretch your world's reality.
Spectacular firefights
As streaming red fifties tattoo,
Clashing with sporadic VC green,
Harmonizes with 81mm quick-flashes.
Distant artillery white blinks
Splits the nearby tree line shadows,
As it cracking thunder
Streaks screaming through the sky.
High on his sky-throne
Spooky pisses his tracers in a gentle flow,
Moaned from multi barreled Gattling guns
That disappear and melt into the blackness below.
Nape at night is out of sight!
It splashes in yellowish, red syrupy splash,
That laboriously floats up, out then down
Smothering the earth and licking it clean.
Bombs are quick and ruthless,
Fast silver-white flashes in the black,
But cutting iron, not flash, kills,
And their mission is grim.
Rockets flash like zipping gangbusters,
Streaking a fiery sparkling tail
That skims into the black void to disappear,
Then resurrect again in detonation.
The sounds of war are different from others,
Not too unpleasant, but distinct,
The eternal crackle and chatter of radios,
Filling the air like white, background noise.
The sights and sounds of war at night,
Are unseen and impersonal,
Without authorship or responsibility,
Somehow removed, to be viewed from afar.
One unpleasant reality of war
Is the smell, the cordite burn,
The acrid sweet smell of sweet pork,
From burning, human meat.
Somehow that and the screams
Of the unseen dying somewhere
Out there, tends to diminish
The beauty and fun of it all.
Poem ny Court Bennett, Former US pilot on active service in Vietnam
www.warpoetry.co.uk/vietnam.htm# THE BEUTY OF WAR
VIETNAMESE MORNING
Before war starts
In early morning
The land is breath taking.
The low, blazing, ruby sun
Melts the night-shadow pools
Creating an ethereal appearance.
Each miniature house and tree
Sprouts its, long, thin shadow
Stretching long on dewy ground.
The countryside is panoramic maze,
Jungle, hamlets, hills and waterways,
Bomb-craters, paddies, broken-backed bridges.
Rice fields glow sky-sheens,
Flat, calm, mirrored lakes
Reflect the morning peace.
The patchwork quilted earth,
Slashed by snaking tree-lines,
Slumbers in dawn's blue light.
Sharp, rugged mountain peaks
Sleep in a soft rolling blanket
Of clinging, slippery, misty fog.
Effortlessly, languidly, it flows
Shyly spreading wispy tentacles out
To embrace the earth with velvet arms.
Curt Bennett
Copyright Curt Bennett © 2003