My young, just married brotherinlaw got killed in Vietnam, as did many others.
I remember sitting in my Problems of Democracy 12th grade class and the instructor telling the boys that they would probably all be enlisted in the next year. It was a very sobering and terrifying thought for those boys in that horrible war! I visited the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington a few years back. I am not one to cry easily and definitely not in public. As I looked at that long, long wall filled with names I broke down like a baby over the enormous loss.