Joe Zinck, one of the people who created the Dorchester Vietnam Veterans Memorial, presided at a Memorial Day ceremony. Reporter file photo

Seventy-nine.

There are 79 names on the Dorchester Vietnam Veteran Memorial. It’s on Morrissey Boulevard just before the entrance to UMass Boston.

There’s a little pull-off so you can park on the side of this busy road and walk down and pay your respects to them.

Seventy-nine.

We don’t know how many were wounded from among the Dorchester deployment and how many lived less than what their full lives would have been because of this war experience. And there were so many hundreds more who served and did return.

I visited the memorial last week on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, April 30. I wrote down all the names.

The Vietnam War was maybe the most important event for most of the generation that is now ages 55 to 75. We knew soldiers who served and many knew kids who were killed. The war, that war, occupied our attention politically and personally.

Those who came of age back then had been raised to believe that communism was evil and our democracy was good. Our soldiers never would kill women and children. We only fight just wars. Our government tells the truth.

Well, communism has been pretty evil but the hands of our country are not always clean. We did kill women and children in this war directly and when we dropped more bombs on little Vietnam than we dropped in all of WW II.

Was this a just war or was it a Civil War? Ho Chi Minh was a communist, but because he was a leader against the Japanese occupation during WWII and the against the return of French colonialism after the war, he would have won a Vietnam wide election if it were held as treaties called for in 1956. So our government said no election. The publication of the government documents called the Pentagon Papers conclusively told us our government didn’t tell us the truth.

Christian Appy sat in on support groups for Vietnam Veterans that were held at the Dorchester House in the 1980s. With that learning, he wrote a book called Working Class War, which is about our neighborhood youth who went to war and the challenges they had in daily living after that. We all know Vietnam Veterans did not return to ‘Welcome Home’ parades like WWII veterans — or their predecessors from other conflicts—did. We show our appreciation now better to veterans returning from the wars over the last 25 years than we did for Vietnam Veterans.

In Appy’s book, he quotes Dan Shaw, who recalled growing up and hanging out at the corner of Train and King Streets and how seven of his buddies went to Vietnam and three were wounded.

“Jeez, it wasn’t bad. I mean some corners really got wiped out. Over off of Norfolk Street ten guys [from there] got blown away the same year.”

It was a very painful war during and afterwards. Gene Grover, the brother-in-law to Dorchester civic leader Peg Moran was a Marine Sergeant killed in Vietnam. Another Dorchester civic leader remembers a letter he got from Gene that said, “We are destroying this beautiful country.”

Our Dorchester kids did their duty. Our political leaders failed them and all of us. Our country learned some things but not enough. At the bottom of the list of names on the Dorchester Vietnam Veterans Memorial, it says, “Through us they will live forever.”

It’s up to us to remember them.

Lew Finfer is a Dorchester resident.