Today is the 47th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, ending once and for all American involvement in Vietnam. The war started when I was attending Fort Dearborn Elementary School in the South Side Brainerd neighborhood of Chicago, and was still going strong when I rushed to the IIT (Illinois Institute of Technology) Bookstore after class to pick up a copy of the Chicago Daily News one day to see what my draft lottery number was, which would determine if I would get a much closer look at Vietnam than I wanted at the time. My number was over 300, thank God, but thousands of others were not so lucky. Over 58,000 Americans died during the war, and total deaths, including civilians, were over 1.3 million, not including the psychological damage to many thousands more. And in the end, all for nothing. So sad.
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