Poet who wrote about Vietnam War dies

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, May 28, 2005

Steve Mason, considered the poet laureate of the Vietnam Veterans of America whose searching blank verse was read at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., has died. He was 65.

Mason died Wednesday in Ashland, Ore., of lung cancer.

California Assemblywoman Patty Berg said Friday in requesting the California Assembly to adjourn in his honor, that although Mason was a proponent of Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act and had qualified for a lethal dose of barbiturates, he did not hasten his death.

Mason, who had lived in San Diego before returning to Ashland last year, testified in February before the California Assembly Committee on Aging and Long-Term Care on behalf of a bill to allow doctors to prescribe lethal medication enabling terminally ill patients to hasten their own death. Oregon is now the only state with such a law on its books.

“This isn’t suicide,” Mason told Time magazine in April when he described his legal acquisition of the Nembutal he never used. “I’ve lived my life with dignity. I want to go out the same way.”

His poem “The Wall Within” was presented at the 1984 dedication of the Vietnam Memorial and was read into the Congressional Record the same year.