While reading the captions accompanying the enlarged photographs from the Vietnam War that hang in the display at the Palmerton Heritage Center, I found myself drawn in, learning something about a time period I wasn't taught about in school.

If, like me, you were a child or teen in the 1980s, chances are your school history classes didn't thoroughly cover the Vietnam War. In my case, I don't recall it ever being covered at all.I don't know why it wasn't addressed. Was it too recent? Were the feelings, the memories of those who would teach it still too raw? Did the writers of the history books figure our parents would tell us? Or did the writers still not really know the whole truth of the history they lived? Were they waiting for time to tell us? I don't know.What I do know is what I remember as a postwar child. I remember the war being "swept under the carpet," so to speak. "It happened, but we don't talk about it," was the unmentioned feel to the whole matter: the skeleton in the nation's closet, the scarlet V borne on the nation's chest, the dirty smudge on a patriotic history.I remember the heated debates between my parents and their siblings about whether Nixon was really a crook or not. It was background noise to me as I sat in the grass at my aunt's house making flower necklaces from the violet weeds in her yard.No one ever really explained the era to me. Explained the war; explained the reasons; explained the violence both there and here.The culture of the day couldn't even agree whether or not to call it a war. Some called it a conflict. After all, war had never actually been declared. It was just supposed to be forgotten.But it was war. It was blood and death and violence. It was hell on earth. And the men who went, who fought, who died and who live with the memories for the rest of their lives deserve to be recognized for their sacrifices. Their stories should be told right along that of the Greatest Generation.If your years in the school system failed to teach you about the Vietnam War, if you remember the war but want to know more, if you are of any generation that wants to see the world as it was during the Vietnam War, then go to the Palmerton Heritage Center to see their display. And when the Moving Wall, a smaller replica of the Vietnam Memorial, comes to town on July 21, go see it. The lives of more than 58,000 servicemen and some women were lost during this unspeakable war.