If they made a Mount Rushmore for great Iowans, former Gov. Bob Ray would surely be the first pick. I'm not sure who the other three slots would go to, but I would nominate and loudly stump for Ken Quinn.

Quinn is undoubtedly the most impressive human being I've ever had the pleasure to know. Raised in Dubuque, Quinn serves as president of the World Food Prize. There, he promotes the legacy of another Iowan, Norman Borlaug, the agricultural scientist whose disease-resistant wheat is credited with saving a billion lives.

Quinn was an officer in the U.S. Foreign Service during Vietnam. He was the first U.S. government official to document the genocidal horrors of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge on the people of Cambodia in the 1970s.

As a special U.S. State Department attache to Ray, Quinn helped bring thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia to Iowa in the late 1970s, as well as organize a massive relief effort that included medical personnel and supplies, food and other aid donated by Iowans.

He eventually rose to U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, where he and his family were regularly shot at and bombed. Quinn stayed on the job until the last Khmer Rouge fighter surrendered. He worked to defeat their evil not with bullets and bombs, but by building roads so farmers could get crops to market and earn the money to live a better life.

"Where the roads end, the insurgency begins," Quinn said.

But the very best thing about Quinn, whom I've come to admire as a humanitarian hero, is that he is a tremendous storyteller.

I don't know if Quinn was always that way or he developed the skill as a consequence of his work in the diplomatic corps. Quinn was eyewitness to the great conflicts of the second half of the 20th century. He has a reporter's questioning mind, a writer's instinct for detail and historian's gift of context and perspective.

Quinn plans to tell one of those stories Tuesday at an invitation-only event at the World Food Prize Hall of Laureates. The story is from the final days of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, which fell 40 years ago to communist forces of North Vietnam, ending the war with America in defeat.

This is the part of the column where you divide the readers. Those in their 50s and especially in their 60s and older remember vividly the videos and photographs of desperate Vietnamese climbing the U.S. embassy walls in hopes of a spot on one of the final helicopters leaving Saigon, later to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City under the communist government.

And then there are the readers like me. I turn 40 this year.

All of this happened months before I was born. I grew up in a world where the Vietnam War was reflected back at me through the cracked prism of popular culture in movies such as "Platoon" and TV shows such as "Tour of Duty."

And for high school kids who were born in the 2000s, Vietnam and all of its cultural impact are memories in history books, as far away in their minds as the Revolutionary War.

Quinn vividly recalls a visit to Vietnam at the behest of President Gerald Ford in late March 1975. Vietnamese families begged him to take their babies with him back to America.

They knew what Quinn was quickly learning: South Vietnam would soon fall. The Americans would be gone and the South Vietnamese, especially those who had aided the Americans during the war, feared terrible reprisals.

Quinn returned home a few weeks before the fall. He reported diligently and incisively on the war. For Quinn, it was a defeat of a lot of good work by Foreign Service officers. Quinn's Vietnam was, like Cambodia would be years later, about building roads and schools — helping poor and starving people find a better life.

The work of people such as Quinn and his Foreign Service officers often is regrettably forgotten by history, which has an unfortunate tendency to focus on generals and battles, rather than diplomacy and peacemaking. Quinn, who is 72, said he realized he would have to begin his talk about Saigon with a brief history of the Vietnam War.

"So much time has passed that a lot of people won't know what I'm talking about," Quinn said.

I worry about that, too, but for a different reason. The Vietnam War scarred America.

It was the first war to have television reports from the field. Americans saw firsthand the true horrors of war: bodies of friend and foe alike burned, bloodied and dismembered.

I was a sophomore at Winterset High School when the Persian Gulf War began in 1990. We watched the war on CNN.

There were few U.S. casualties. It seemed a clear victory, though history proved it to be anything but that. President George H.W. Bush said, "We kicked that Vietnam thing" after the Gulf War, in reference to the pain that still lingered after the failures in Vietnam.

Bush was right, but in a different way than he intended. The imagery of Vietnam is savage.

Television put the violence of war into our living rooms. Middle class America found out it didn't have the stomach for it and slowly turned against the war, and maybe against all war.

War is different now. It requires fewer troops on the ground. Drones controlled by servicemen at computers stateside make strikes that once required full-scale invasion.

But death and destruction are still the hallmarks of war. Men, women and children die, often horribly.

What's different is what we see of these wars. Fourteen years we've fought in Afghanistan. We spent nine years in Iraq.

Rarely did a network broadcast footage from the front lines that showed combat deaths. Seldom do print and digital news outlets publish photos of wounded or dead U.S. military personnel. And the countless wounded, dead and scarred Iraqis and Afghans have been practically invisible.

The editors and producers will, rightly so, tell you the public doesn't want to see that. But I wonder if we shouldn't have done so? Not just the Register, of course, but all news media.

It feels as if we have sanitized these wars to make them family-friendly. We cover the send-off parades. We cover the flag-draped caskets at funerals and the homecoming celebrations.

But the war, the gritty, bloody horror of it? Most of us forget that it's there unless we are from one of the very small percentage of families who have direct ties to our men and women in the military.

I was at East High School a week or so ago, in a room of about 30 kids between 15 and 18 years old. They have never known an America at peace.

I asked them about the wars. They knew about them, of course, but the definite sense was that the war in Afghanistan rarely breaks through the stream of tweets and Facebook updates on their phones.

I don't like living in a country that's used to being at war, that's comfortable being at war and forgets that it's at war. It makes us more bloodthirsty.

Our politicians play to our fears and play up terror threats. Our military industrial complex puts a lot of money in campaign accounts.

War is a big business. If we don't see and feel the consequences of war, we become detached.

We develop foreign polices that require more military actions. North Korea makes a threat about a silly movie? Let's bomb them, people shout. Trouble in Syria? Send in the Marines.

And so I think about Quinn, who Thursday will stand before a crowd of VIPs and talk about a war that is fading quickly from the active memories of Americans. I wish there were more people who lifted up the kind of work Quinn did in the Foreign Service. Down with bullets and bombs. Up with roads and schools.

Anyway, Quinn will tell a great story. He always does. It will be vivid, rich and full of humanity. I hope they record it and put a copy in the state archives, maybe broadcast it on Iowa Public Television.

Because Quinn will make that small group of people remember the Vietnam War. I just hope somebody would remind the rest of us about the war we're still in.


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