By JODY BENSON
Los Alamos

I invited a friend to dinner for Vietnam Veterans Day—he, a Vietnam Vet in the 8th Infantry who got “in country” right after TET, and I, ARC SRAO (Donut Dollie) attached to the US military in Korea.

Later I was thinking about that half century between our service and now. Many of our generation understood that although our Myth of Moral America with Liberty and Justice for All was not yet true, we heartfeltedly believed that if we struggled for it, Martín Luther King’s arc of the universe would bend toward justice.

Now? Now the myth of a moral nation is so skewed that the arc of history is pointing to totalitarianism as the Musk/Trump (Mump) regime, supported by Congress more afraid of the Mump than its constituents, defies laws to steal not only the jobs of current workers, but the entitlements we oldsters invested in during our own working decades.

And more than that, the Mump is disremembering history. Every day, more people and their accomplishments are being eliminated from every public story, including all the small actions that create community. But the human heart remembers. That’s what my friend and I were talking about.

War stories are primarily about men, principally heterosexual, Christian, white. There are few war stories about women. Now as the Mump excises all non-HCWM history, I wonder whether Glenna Goodacre’s Vietnam Women’s Memorial sculpture will be removed from the National Mall.

I remember 1993, the day the sculpture left Santa Fe on its 45-day cross-country tour to the Mall. The announcement went out statewide that there would be a dedication in the south lawn of the PERA Building across Old Santa Fe from the Roundhouse. An acre of people surrounded the statue—all those mostly male vets in their boonie hats or 20-yr-old uniforms unbuttoned so they could fit in the shirts. Each of us felt like we’d peeled off the quarter-century of flesh to regain the easy muscle and optimism of youth.

There we were in Santa Fe, all together in 1993, that acre of 50-yr-old mostly men remembering themselves as teens, as 20-year-olds, as who they had been when they met the women now represented as their forever-young “girls”. A few of the “girls” were there, too. I, stationed in Korea, looked on them with awe.

We, each of us, came to honor the women. In the sculpture, none of the women has insignia—Glenna Goodacre told me she added no insignia on purpose so that every woman of every branch—including the Red Cross Donut Dollies—could see herself.

For me that day, the biggest honor to those finally-remembered women were the veterans from the nations: the Pueblos, the Navajo, the Apache… They came from all over the state and danced, each in honor regalia. The drums, the bells, the singing, were the backdrop to all the reunions of “Hey! Bro! S’at you? F*in’ A!”

As always, community is created by women. And honoring these women reunited old friends.

These depictions of the seldom-recognized heroic acts of women? The men remember. I don’t think even DOGE can erase that memory from the heart’s record.