The curtain is about to go up on a series of events to mark the 50^th anniversary the Vietnam War, but the Boston Globe is reporting that the plans to celebrate America’s Vietnam veterans “are sputtering.” It reports that few events are planned and “crucial corporate sponsorship is nonexistent.” Most veterans, it reports, “have not even heard about the effort.” The Globe quotes a veteran Marine Corps captain, Phillip Jennings, as saying the problem is “leadership and motivation.” There is “no real direction,” he says. “There is no champion of it at the Pentagon or the White House.”

It is tempting to blame President Obama. He is, after all, the commander-in-chief on this anniversary. But we’ll demur. It is hard to recall many more affecting expressions of appreciation for a Vietnam hero than that the president voiced earlier this month, when he awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously to Army Specialist Leslie Sabo Jr., for valor above and beyond the call of duty. Sabo, who was born at Austria to a family that had been forced out of Hungary by the communists, arrived in America at the age of two. He was a GI with the 101th Airborne Division, when, on May 20, 1970, he was killed in action against the North Vietnamese communists at Se San, Cambodia.

In the face of enemy fire, Sabo threw back an enemy hand grenade and shielded an injured comrade from its blast, then rushed an enemy machine gun nest and, as he lay mortally wounded, threw in a hand grenade that silenced it. To make certain the enemy couldn’t dodge the grenade, he had waited until the last second to pull the pin. He himself perished in the blast. One thing that makes Sabo’s story so affecting is that the documentation of his self-sacrifice came to light only in 1999, when a veteran of the 101st, Alton Mabb, a columnist for the division association’s magazine, was doing research and was handed, by an archivist, a box that contained the initial documentation of Sabo’s valor. Mr. Mabb took it upon himself to pick up the quest to get his fallen comrade the nation’s highest military honor.

Mr. Mabb and Sabo’s widow, Rose Mary Sabo-Brown, were present at the ceremony at the White House when Mr. Obama spoke. “This month,” the president said, “we’ll begin to mark the 50th anniversary* of the Vietnam War, a time when, to our shame, the soldiers didn’t always receive the respect and the thanks that they deserve.” He called it “a mistake that must never be repeated.” He made a point of adding that he would be present on Memorial Day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at Washington to help inaugurate the series of events and ceremonies that will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the year of the first Vietnam service ribbon.

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It was President Reagan, then a governor running for the White House, who first went before a veterans group and declared that our cause in Vietnam was a noble one. There will always be those who say that Vietnam is a war we should never have waged. The famed correspondent Stanley Karnow was quoted by the Boston Globe to that effect. But if the Vietnam War should never have been fought, it was not the Americans and the Free Vietnamese — or our South Korean, Australian, and Free Chinese allies — who should never have fought it. That burden lies with the communists in Hanoi and their masters in Moscow and suppliers in Peking.

One of the things to remember on the 50^th anniversary of our expedition is that the free Vietnamese of the South were the underdogs in that fight. They were attacked by a vast communist empire on several fronts. It was an impulse of classic American idealism to attempt to defend them, and we were not defeated on the field of battle. We were defeated in the halls of Congress, though not for long. America, under Reagan, pulled itself together, and the Soviet communists quavered and fell, and Indochina came to be understood as a battle in a much vaster struggle in which the Free World was victorious. Now our country is coming together to remember the heroism of GIs like Leslie Sabo and to give him and his comrades a share of the glory of Vietnam.

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* It was in 1962 that there was authorized the Vietnam service ribbon.