Your headline writer in (the June 1) edition, as a subhead, said, “Hecklers decry president’s appearance at the wall.”

Hecklers? Isn’t that a pretty shabby way to characterize those people who obviously took extreme umbrage at President Clinton’s visit to the Vietnam Memorial?

Let’s look at the record. Clinton didn’t take the normal college deferment that many others did. He didn’t choose to slide by the Vietnam War in a cushy college dorm or even in the reserves as did Dan Quayle. No, he actively took part in anti-war programs and anti-war demonstrations in England, thereby giving aid and comfort to the enemy — not too far removed from Jane Fonda’s conduct.

You may recall the comment of (James) Stockdale, who spent five or more years in a Viet Cong prison camp, that “their voices aided our enemies, not us.”

At the wall on Memorial Day, Clinton said, “I disagreed …” Hell’s bells, Clinton did a great deal more than simply disagree with national policy. He demonstrated against that policy.

And because some old veterans booed his appearance at the wall they are nothing more than hecklers? Shame on you. Perhaps they are remembering buddies who didn’t have a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and, instead, went to Southeast Asia to die in a political war set by up JFK and LBJ and, yes, Nixon too.

I am a World War II veteran. But I, too, would have turned my back on Clinton. I lied and cheated to get into World War II whereas Clinton lied and cheated to stay out of Vietnam. The Vietnam wall is not a symbol for healing. It is a symbol to the men and women who did not return.

While it may be politically correct to talk of healing, the wall is a monument to those men and women who gave their lives to a United States policy, flawed though it was. I think Clinton’s appearance and speech at the wall was in poor taste, if not a travesty to the 58,000 names thereon. Healing. Hell, it was salt in the wound. John Jay Hanlon Springfield