Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - A debate raging on the Internet has slopped over into public view and public print, and it is a debate that should never have started. It concerns a long-overdue decision by the U.S. Air Force and the Department of Defense to engrave the name of Air Force Capt. Edward Alan Brudno on the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.
Al Brudno did not die in Vietnam, where he spent seven and a half years in the cells of such North Vietnamese prisons as the Briarpatch, Son Tay and the infamous Hoa Lo Prison - the Hanoi Hilton.
Four months after he came home to a hero's welcome with the other American POWs in 1973, Al Brudno killed himself just one day before his 33rd birthday.
Former POW Orson Swindle, a Marine pilot who is now a member of the Federal Trade Commission, had the cell next to Brudno for more than two years in Son Tay Prison Camp. They "talked" incessantly by tapping on the wall in a code.
"He was very young, very intense, very intelligent," Swindle remembers. "He had a degree in aerospace engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Al Brudno wanted to be an astronaut."
Swindle said Brudno hated his communist captors and constantly searched for ways to thwart them or ridicule them. "He was a little guy so he used guile and cunning to outwit the guards," Swindle added. He was also one of the best at sending hidden messages in the few letters he was permitted to write home.
A year ago Swindle urged Bob Brudno, Al's brother, to ask the Air Force to investigate Al Brudno's death and add his name to the Wall. There was a thorough investigation, and the Air Force found that it had not done right by Al Brudno. He had been cut loose upon his return from Hanoi, without the support or counseling that is now routine for all returning POWs - routine now BECAUSE of Al Brudno's death.
"Al came home with mortal wounds," Swindle says. "His suicide was a result of deep wounds that were both physical and mental. I know of no one more entitled to a place on that Wall than Al Brudno."
The Air Force approved it, and forwarded it to the Department of Defense, which normally accedes to the recommendations of the services and sends the approved name to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund for engraving.
That should have been that. But the executive director of the VVMF and one of the co-founders of the organization that built the memorial, former Army grunt Jan Scruggs, decided to go public with his opposition to adding Brudno's name to the Wall.
Scruggs hit the Internet and in e-mails called the decision of the Air Force "preposterous." He declared that this act would create a "new and broad criteria" and make it necessary to add the names of at least 20,000 other Vietnam veterans who took their own lives after the war.
"This decision by (the Department of Defense) threatens the integrity and historical interpretation of the Wall," Scruggs wrote. He postulated that the act of putting Brudno's name on the memorial would somehow encourage veterans to come and kill themselves there.
Scruggs is wrong, of course. First, there is no change in the criteria. If, upon investigation, one of the services decides to place a name on the wall and the Department of Defense endorses the decision, then it is the VVMF's job - and Jan Scruggs' job - to engrave the name on the Wall. Period.
The name of Edward Alan Brudno DESERVES to be on the Wall, among the 58,335 other American servicemen who either died in Vietnam, or afterward, of their wounds. The names of suicides are already there, if they died in Vietnam. Al Brudno just managed to make it home before he bled out.
Al Brudno took everything the North Vietnamese dished out and beat them at their own game for seven and a half years. He came home to a fine welcome, and the cheers of the crowds, but when the crowds went home and the POW family split up, there was no one there to help him deal with all that he had suffered - the torture, the isolation, the loss of the best part of his youth.
Welcome home, good and faithful soldier. Welcome home.
