Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Memorial Day speech observing interment of unknown Vietnam service member ‘healed scars,’ writer says

In his essay for We Are the Mighty, Stephen Ruiz declared that President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 Memorial Day speech observing the interment of an unknown Vietnam service member at Arlington National Cemetery “healed scars.”

“We write no last chapters,” Reagan told the crowd, Ruiz recalled. “We close no books. We put away no final memories. An end to America’s involvement in Vietnam cannot come before we’ve achieved the fullest possible accounting of those missing in action.”

‘The Vietnam Unknown never heard such cheers.’

More from Ruiz’s essay:

A decade after the final U.S. troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973, some service members who fought in Southeast Asia couldn’t forget the harsh treatment that fellow Americans heaped upon them. Some were spat on while others received the middle finger or were called “baby killers.” They served their country and were blamed for the United States not defeating the North Vietnamese.

Reagan realized old wounds can’t go unattended. Two years after the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., Reagan used his oratorical gifts to promote a better understanding of what Vietnam veterans endured.

The president continued a tradition from past wars and awarded the Medal of Honor to the Vietnam Unknown. That nice moment was not enough for Reagan. He reached out to military families residing in a continual, painful limbo because of a loved one MIA. Reagan told them that a grateful nation understood their plight.

“They live day and night with uncertainty, with an emptiness, with a void that we cannot fathom,” Reagan said, Ruiz recalled.

The author noted that Reagan’s speech added references to President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address — and that volunteers read nearly 58,000 names on the Vietnam Veterans Wall in 1982 over the course of three days.

Ruiz also noted that Reagan read from a newspaper article about a restaurant dinner former Marines shared and that a group of college students — “some of them likely still in diapers when the first U.S. troops arrived in Vietnam in 1965,” Ruiz wrote — mingled with them, then applauded them as the veterans left the eatery.

Ruiz remembered that Reagan, reading from the newspaper article, quoted one former Marine’s response: “The whole week, it was worth it just for that.”

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“The Vietnam Unknown never heard such cheers,” Ruiz added in his essay. “In so many ways, wars never end for those who knew someone MIA. So many unanswered questions remain, threatening to expose a deep sense of loss always lingering just below the surface.”

The author added that “in 1984, Reagan was acutely aware of that.”

In his speech, the president said of the unknown soldier, “About him we may well wonder, as others have: As a child, did he play on some street in a great American city? Or did he work beside his father on a farm out in America’s heartland? Did he marry? Did he have children? Did he look expectantly to return to a bride?”

In conclusion, Reagan noted, “Today, we simply say with pride, ‘Thank you, dear son. May God cradle you in His loving arms.'”

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