As Memorial Day approaches, one of the questions is who will clean up the Vietnam wall at Venice, California. It was defaced the other day, CBS News reports (Drudge had the story up immediately). “An awful sight on this Memorial Day weekend” is how it was described by CBS. An officer of the Venice Chamber of Commerce called it a “desecration.” The question is: who will clean it up?

Maybe Jane Fonda will volunteer. The movie star supposedly regrets that, when she went to visit the North Vietnamese while our GIs were still in combat and some of them were being held as prisoners of war, she allowed herself to be photographed on enemy anti-aircraft gun. She relates the story on her official Web site, where she called it one thing “that I will regret to my dying day.”

Helping to restore the defaced Vietnam veterans memorial might help Miss Fonda feel better about herself — and the veterans, too. Maybe she could get Bill Clinton to pitch in. He spent the war dodging the draft and, at one point, even fetched up in Moscow. He defeated a war hero, Bob Kerrey, in the 1992 Democratic primary in Georgia. But he’s never quite put paid to the question of his default during the war.

Think of it. A former president and the generation’s most famous movie starlet picking up bristle brushes and soap and cleaning up the war memorial. Maybe they could get Bernie Sanders to help. When he could have served in Vietnam, he was doing time on a kibbutz in Israel. Nothing wrong with that, though the kibbutz he chose was one that venerated Stalin, even while our GIs were being attacked in Stalin’s name.

What a signal it would send were Senator Sanders, who all of a sudden wants to be president of America, to appear at Venice, ready to scrub. Plus, too, he might be able to get Donald Trump to pitch in. The presumptive nominee has said publicly that he has felt bad for not serving during Vietnam, and this would be a good chance for him to make a statement.

Maybe, too, John Kerry could show up. He is the one-time Navy officer who, though he went to war in Vietnam, fell away from the war and testified against his fellow GIs before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He quoted other anti-war GIs as saying they behaved in Vietnam like Genghis Khan. No wonder people are defacing the names of those who served in the war in Indochina.

It’s not our purpose here to question the patriotism of any of these figures or any of the millions who opposed the war in Vietnam. It’s merely to suggest that these figures might make a terrific cleanup squad for the memorial that was defaced. They are famous figures, and their example would inspire millions. And 41 years after they helped get Congress to end the war, they have a chance to help burnish the memory of those who served.