ONE NEVER KNOWS THE ODD TURNS LIFE TAKES.

The course of today's posting has led me to an email exchange with the author of that beautiful piece (see POWERFULLY MOVING PIECE) below.

And as you will see, I am blessed as a result of it. As part of our correspondence she sent me a copy of a column she wrote in observance of the 25th anniversary of the USA's departure from South Vietnam.

I am tense in this place, watching, watching, watching. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Walter Cronkite is there. It is a memory place lined with newscasts of gray military coffins and American flags, Agent Orange, Army fatigues, protesters spitting on young soldiers, and military funerals in small towns across America.

I am a "waiting wife" in my memory graveyard. My friends are Vietnam protesters. In this place in my memory, my infant son is crying in the background, but I shush him while I tensely watch the television set. Someone sings protest songs in the other room, and my friends speak cruelly of the men such as my young husband who have been sent overseas and emotionally abandoned by their Congress, their president, their friends and their neighbors.

It is here that I remember awaiting, each day, the unmarked Army vehicle, which blessedly never comes to my door.

I know that nearby and faraway across the country, those cars, each with two solemn men who knock on the doors of mothers and wives, are arriving daily. They arrive at the doorsteps of brokenhearted families year after year, from the 1960s to the 70s. There are 58,000 cars which deliver the news to fathers and mothers and wives and fiances who cry out in unspeakable grief as they hear the words. "Your son/husband/father is dead." I am blessed that I never see the death car at my memory's door. But I am sorrowful remembering all those who are met by it at the threshold of heartbreak.

My friends, swap some of the dated specifics in this piece and in many ways she could be speaking of our community today.

Read the whole thing here.

But do it slowly.