""Mom," he said, getting ready to put his feet on the bus from Hamilton to Buffalo. "Mom, will you pray for my soul?" A smile cleared his mother's face, and her tears quickly disappeared. 

Little did Dennis know that this would be the last time he would see his mother, as both she and his father would die while he was far from home, fighting in the Vietnam War.

At a time when thousands of draft-dodging Americans were streaming into Canada, thousands of Canadians crossed the border the other way to fight in Vietnam. Mike Gillhoolley, chairman of the Canadian POW/MIA  Information Centre, puts the number at between 30,000 - 40,000.

Sunday night, thirty-one years later, Thomson, now 52, stands looking at a long, sloping black marble wall in Washington, D.C. Sunday night, peering back through the halls of his memory. This is his third time here, and once again he is looking for a way to hold back his own tears as he reads through some of the 58,000 names etched into the stone panels of the Vietnam Memorial.

"Did you know," he asks quietly, "that when it rains, the names disappear? That's why I call this the American wailing wall, because it's like the tears come out of the wall itself to briefly cover the names carved into it."

"This is the American way of saying, 'lest we forget'."

"We were strangers in a strange world (the United States)," he says in his strong, gravelly voice, "and they put us in an even stranger one."

Thomson, now a part-time labourer in Hamilton who lives in Westdale, served two tours of duty as a combat medic in Vietnam, one in 1968 during the Tet Offensive and another in 1971. Between tours, he served in a med-evac hospital in Japan. 

He has two answers for why he went to Vietnam. "Why not?" and more seriously, because he could not allow himself to sit back and let somebody else go instead. 

He reaches back into his memory and recites an old Indian proverb: "We do not for ourselves alone, but die for others."

"There's a certain percentage of men who have the call, the call for freedom," he says, "and that's a good enough reason for anyone to do this."

When he arrived in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1968, Thomson was asked if he was scared of blood.  "No," he responded.

"Then we'll make you into a medic," said the recruitment officer.

After receiving the necessary training, Thomson arrived in Vietnam, where he served with Alpha Troop I/I Armored Cavalry in the 23rd Infantry Division. He worked with 17 other men in his platoon, doing his best to keep the injured and maimed alive while waiting for helicopters under
heavy fire in the sweltering Vietnamese jungle.

"I think I was a good medic. Actually, I know I was a good medic," he says between stories of a camaraderie among his "brothers"  fellow troops  in Vietnam which was tighter and closer than that of his blood family. 

He says he has won a handful of medals and ribbons, but will not say anything more on the subject. "You can have them all if you want them," he says, his clear blue eyes catching a stray ray of light and flickering in the shadows.

He chuckles softly. Despite the medals and ribbons, none of the Canadian Vietnam veterans ever received any official recognition from either the Canadian or the American government, he says. The only monument given them is "the North Wall," a memorial unveiled in Windsor in 1995
and inscribed with the names of missing or dead Canadians Vietnam veterans. It was paid for by the veterans themselves.

"We never got a parade when we got home  all we had was our brothers," he says. "It was like we came home as thieves in the night."

But chiselled into Washington's Vietnam memorial are the names of 103 Canadians who died or went missing in action while serving another country. Yesterday, America's Memorial Day, Gillhoolley, Thomson and several other Canadians laid a small maple leaf flag at the base of each panel in the wall containing the name of a Canadian man or woman.

Those tiny fluttering red and white mementos joined the flowers, poems, photographs, bracelets, dog-tags, love notes and cans of beer left behind by mourners in remembrance of sons, fathers and grandfathers lost overseas.

Walking through clumps of solemn-eyed people late into the night before Memorial Day, Thomson points into the darkness, where faintly visible silhouettes trace the shapes of veterans, stooped over on park benches.

"Soldiers lose a little piece of their soul," he says. "At this memorial, in your own way you're trying to patch that part of your heart."