They were vital and young, most of them nineteen, 
twenty, or twenty-one, those ninety-eight men 
called to protect what was deemed the common good — 
in a far-off, strange and violence-touched place, 
Vietnam.

They left Ohio’s pleasant Erie shores, and fertile fields, 
having to forsake places of learning and industry: 
they learned to adapt to struggles waged across 
unfamiliar rice paddies, rivers, jungles and hills. 
They hoped their vigilance and bravery 
would end the endless conflict.

They dreamed of return to the life each had put on hold. 
They wanted to pursue that life, with all its promise. 
But it was not to be for the ninety-eight 
whose friends and family learned to pray and wait.
Their dreams of happy homecoming remain unfulfilled.

We salute, we thank them all. 
We recall their sacrifice. 
We honor “The Lorain County Ninety-Eight.”

With this memorial, 
We mourn their deaths. 
We celebrate their lives. 
—Nancy Spiegelberg 

© 2007 Nancy Spiegelberg