I noted with sorrow the Recorder’s editorial cartoon published on May 3, which honors the 58,220 American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War. We grieve for those lost lives. But the cartoon is a lie, because it tells only a fraction of the story. For surely it is not just our own American soldiers who died that had lives worth living, and whose deaths are worth noting with grief. No one knows how many people died in that fruitless war, but one of the more recent estimates was a 2008 study by the British Medical Journal that estimated a total of 3,812,000 dead in Vietnam between 1955 and 2002. That’s not a number; those are people.

And what did that war accomplish? Nothing, except perhaps to increase the take-home pay of weapons manufacturers. All those deaths — all those unlived lives — for what? And what about the Iraq War, based on false information and driven by the insecure egos of men in power? What about the bombing the U.S. is doing right now in Yemen? How can we humans take the lives of others so mindlessly? And how can we stand by as the Israeli government deliberately withholds food and medical aid from starving, wounded and dying people in Gaza, after its indiscriminate killing of more than 50,000 individuals, nearly a third of them children. Isn’t each of those precious lives worthy of being mourned?

Marion Griswold

Greenfield