Randy Barnett knows the Wall can heal. He has made the pilgrimage to Washington to stare at its black panels — and to remember.

“It’s a sacred place now,” says Barnett, 57, president of Kansas City’s Chapter 317 of the Vietnam Veterans of America.

“It takes a lot of courage to go up to it. It helps you … and it’s a release because you can leave some of what happened to you there.”

Thousands are visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial this weekend to mark its 25th anniversary with parades, speeches and ceremonies. Volunteers are spending days reading the more than 58,000 names etched into the granite.

The Wall is the most-visited monument in Washington, drawing more than 3 million visitors each year. Its magnetic power is just as strong as ever, says Jan Scruggs, who began pushing for a Vietnam veterans memorial in 1979.

There’s something alive about it, he says, something in the way it touches people. Its simple design encourages visitors to reach out to the names of the soldiers and sailors, airmen and Marines who died in Southeast Asia

[url=http://www.kansascity.com/105/story/356028.html]Twenty-five years after its dedication, Vietnam memorial still has power to heal
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The Vietnam War Memorial is a powerful symbol of just how much we lost to that war.

Why can't we take the honor we bestowed upon those vets and extend that honor to those Vietnam era vets that are still alive and in need of further support?

Some 645,000 Vietnam era vets are uninsured.

A few hundred thousand of the Vietnam vets are homeless.

Agreed, CZ...and where will the Iraq and Afghanistan War memorials go?...by the time they're over, if they ever are, there may not be any place in DC big enough to put them if all the names of the lost are included.

Without a radical change and improvement of conscience and consciousness, it would never include anything but American service personnel, so there will be plenty of room. This is one of the reasons the war crimes continue; all other deaths are considered acceptable and in most cases desirable.