The black granite slabs of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington are never without visitors.
Better known simply as “the Wall,” the stones are carved with the names of more than 58,000 men and women who died during combat that spanned Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos from 1958 to 1975.
Now, 50 years after that war’s end, the Wall continues to draw more than five million visitors every year.
To take it all in, you would have to stand in the middle of the memorial at the wall’s apex, facing the stone.
The first American to die in the war appears to your right. What follows are names listed in alphabetical order by date of death. As they reach the tapered end of the eastern wall on the right, the chronology wraps around and continues at the far left end of the western wall until it meets the apex.
Those whose bodies were recovered are marked with a small diamond. Those whose remains have yet to be found have a small cross by their names. When they are located, identified and repatriated, the crosses will be chiseled into diamonds.
The memorial is a place of unexplainable power, many who visit say, and volunteer guides often speak of it as “Wall magic.”
When Karl Marlantes was a young Marine infantry officer, his company spent two years in Vietnam. One foggy, wintry morning in the early 1990s, he went to visit 93 of his Marines whose names are set in the Wall’s stones.
“I’m there sort of feeling like I’m by myself, and I see Ray Delgado’s name, who was a kid in my platoon,” Mr. Marlantes said in an interview. “And I just reached up, and I started to touch his name, and I hear this woman’s voice behind me.
“She says, ‘Did you know Ray Delgado? He’s my uncle.’
“I mean, out of 59,000 dead names, and one morning in the winter out of thousands, the niece of Ray Delgado shows up when I’m touching his name?” Mr. Marlantes continued. “You gotta say that’s not just coincidence. The odds are really against it. And so what is that? There’s some kind of energy here, or maybe it’s Ray, or I don’t know.”
Some leave things behind when they visit.
At the end of most days, volunteer guides take the keepsakes to a nearby visitor center. From there, many of the items are taken to a warehouse, where they are cataloged and archived.
One veteran who has most likely seen more of the Wall, the visitors and what they left behind there over the years than anyone is Jan Scruggs, who fought in Vietnam and raised private donations to build the memorial when he returned home.
Mr. Scruggs estimates that he has come to the Wall about 1,000 times since it opened to the public in 1982.
Weeks before Memorial Day, he was there again, speaking to an association of helicopter pilots who fly medical evacuation missions. Some in the group flew those missions in Vietnam.
The messages left at the Wall by children — often adorned with drawings in crayon or marker — affect him the most.
“Things that are written by hand, by younger people, who are just learning how to write, but they’re trying to pour their souls out,” Mr. Scruggs explained, adding that in sum they were “a ton of just good stories, they capture people, they’re worth reading, they’re worth writing.”
Some leave talismans in thanks for those who safely came home.
“My mother had us say the rosary together every week for my brother Don when he was stationed there in Vietnam from 1965 to 1966, so he would come back home alive,” said Dave Walden, who left his childhood rosary at the Wall decades later. “I was convinced it kept his name off that wall.”
Other visitors want to take something with them when they leave.
The volunteer guides, wearing yellow hats and shirts, carry rectangular slips of paper and a handful of small pencils or nubs of graphite. Visitors can use those to make a “rubbing” of a name carved into the Wall.
On their cellphones, the guides look up the exact location of a name and lead visitors there.
For names high up on a stone, the guides grab one of a half-dozen stepladders lying in the grass nearby and climb to the site. They check that their paper frames the name precisely.
Holding the paper firm to the Wall, the guides help visitors rub pencil lead over a name, creating a ghostly photonegative.
Kate Tealdi, 28, made her first visit to the Wall the weekend before Memorial Day to see a man she felt she had grown up with but never met.
She calls him Papa Crane.
He was her father’s best friend.
“My dad would tell stories about his time in Vietnam, and honestly, how terrible the war was, and also how William Crane saved his life multiple times,” Ms. Tealdi said after making a rubbing of the name. “One of them made it, and the other didn’t.”
She said her father had told her about how his friend had died. He was shot, and his body was torn apart. “Dad identified his body because he recognized his feet,” she said.
Mr. Crane, an Army first lieutenant, was killed on Dec. 18, 1969, in Binh Long, Vietnam. He left behind a wife and a young child.
Holding close the rubbing she had made, Ms. Tealdi said she found a measure of peace from a war that had ended long before she was born.
“It’s been a very healing experience, honestly,” she said. “I think the sad thing, too, is this kind of thing is never going to bring them back, but at least we can remember them and love them anyway.”
John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy.
The post 50 Years After Saigon’s Fall, ‘the Wall’ Reflects and Collects a Nation’s Trauma appeared first on New York Times.
