Recently more than a hundred veterans of the Vietnam antiwar movement and peace scholars and activists gathered in Washington, D.C. to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, arguably one of the most significant and iconic demonstrations of the peace movement, also the subject of Norman Mailer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Armies of the Night.
The commemorative event included a vigil at the Pentagon near the site of the original protest, a conference with analyses of the antiwar movement and recollections from the March by those who participated, and a walk to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Washington Mall.
At the Memorial, aka “the Wall,” we gathered to lay a wreath in honor of those who suffered from the war. We noted that if the Memorial were extended to include the names of the millions of victims of the war in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, it would stretch more than two miles to beyond the Capitol building and across the Potomac past the Pentagon.
I was asked to offer some words on behalf of the soldiers memorialized at the Wall and those who served during the war. My comments are below:
We approach the Wall with a deep sense of reverence.
This is sacred ground for many of us, a hallowed place in which we remember and pay respects to the more than 58,000 American soldiers who lost their lives, to the hundreds of thousands who suffered severe injuries, to the millions who experienced post-traumatic stress and continue to suffer to this day, and to their families, friends, and colleagues who suffered with them.
This is a place of sadness and mourning, which is always the case when we remember the losses of war, but in this case, the sadness and mourning are particularly poignant and tragic, for a war that we know was unjust and unwinnable. A war of imperial ambition. A war that was profoundly immoral and a violation of international law. A war that was unnecessary and in vain.
And so this must also be a place of recommitment and rededication to working for peace, to struggling for justice and human rights to prevent war. To opposing and stopping the unnecessary and futile wars our country is pursuing today in Afghanistan and half a dozen other countries.
We hereby devote ourselves in the years we have remaining to carry on the struggle for justice and peace, to pass along our ideals to the children and grandchildren and young people everywhere who come after us, to carry on the movement against war.
And if we are successful, if we can turn America away from militarism and wars of intervention, if we can build a culture and politics of peace, then perhaps those we remember here today will not have died in vain, and we can create a future with no more victims of unjust war.
David Cortright 
The speech is apprppriate if not very original, although Lincolnesque,