One hundred years ago today

marked the official end of the fighting. It is seen as the end of WWI but the reality is that there were still a great many problems.
And then we had WWII. We had Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and numerous other wars and skirmishes which have killed people and animals and destroyed the lives of future generations.
    "My Dad died when I was four. I didn't know then but it was a result of the war," someone told me recently. She is almost 90 and her father fought in WWI. It has been a matter of life-long regret that she never really knew him, that all she has are vague memories of him. I felt for her and thought perhaps I had been lucky although it didn't seem like that.
When the two of us and a couple of other people handed over the wreath our knitting guild had made I was struggling to maintain my composure because forty-one years ago, almost to the day, the man I intended to marry was killed as a result of another war.  He was in Vietnam at the time - on government work. He hadn't wanted to go. We had decided to delay announcing our engagement until he came back. He didn't come back, or not that way.  He was killed on a street corner by someone who took exception to his presence there -  the killer believed that all Westerners were bad because a Westerner had killed his family. 
It didn't matter that David was barely old enough to have even fought in that war and had nothing to do with it. He was, in the mind of that man, a "bad" person. I wonder how many more Vietnamese, particularly older Vietnamese, still feel that way? It may not even be a conscious thing, just an underlying uneasiness. I know it took me some years before I could relax in the company of any Vietnamese students I met. I didn't blame them for what happened. I never told them and they would have been embarrassed and upset if I had but I still couldn't quite relax. 
Now I have acquaintances from many countries, cultures, religious and political backgrounds. That is as it should be. Some of those acquaintances are also friends but I realise I don't have any Vietnamese friends. It hasn't been a conscious decision on my part, simply something that has just happened. Have I been unconsciously avoiding the big Vietnamese community here - or have our paths just not crossed? I don't know. I hope it is the latter but it does make me realise that all we can acknowledge today is the official end of a conflict that cost far too many lives.
And every year David's father has sent me a message on the anniversary of  his son's death. His father is now a very old man indeed and I doubt there will be any more messages. I think he knows it too because this one said,
      "Thinking of you and what might have been my almost-daughter."
And that did make me weep - for an old man who lost his son in a war that neither of them fought in.