Vietnam Wall touches visitors at night

By: EDMOND JACOBY - Staff Writer | Saturday, April 24, 2004 10:56 PM PDT ∞

OCEANSIDE ---- Jerry Jones paced up and down the red-carpeted walkway, scanning the names engraved on the black wall's panels, looking for the name of a man he never met.

A lanky Vista resident who looks more like an old sourdough from gold country than anything else, Jones made the trek to Oceanside's waterfront Friday night to find that name, Thomas P. Brady. It was somewhere amidst more than 58,000 others, and he needed help finding it.

Help there was: volunteers stood by to sort out the sometimes mystifying arrangement of the names, which are listed chronologically, day-by-bloody day through nearly two decades of America's deadly encounter in a country not much bigger than New Mexico. The names of those who died on any given day are arranged alphabetically, which means the alphabet begins anew thousands of times.

Jones was one of hundreds of late-night visitors to The Vietnam Wall Experience, a touring replica of Maya Ying Lin's monument to the fallen of a war that rent the social and political fabric of the United States and changed its very image of itself.

From sundown to 11 p.m. Friday the visitors seemed equally divided between people who knew someone whose name was engraved on the wall and those who were merely curious. But according to Tom Taylor, one of the volunteers serving as guides, it's during the overnight hours that those who still carry the deepest wounds from Vietnam come to visit.

"A lot of the old guys won't even come until everybody else has gone," Taylor said.

Taylor spends a lot of time asking visitors to make sure that they always rub the impressions of at least two names from the wall, the one they're after and at least one more.

"That's so no one ever leaves the wall alone," he said.

The replica is not exact. For one thing, all of its panels are the same height, about 7 feet. The memorial, located near the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., is 10 feet 3 inches tall at its center, the apex of a 125 degree angle that separates its east and west arms, which taper to just 8 inches tall at their ends, nearly 500 feet apart.

The top of the memorial in Washington is level, just as the top of the replica is level. Walking the memorial from end to end is a trip downhill to the center, then uphill again to the end. Somehow it strikes a visitor that it is fitting that the chronology of the war's dead both begins and ends at the center, flowing away to one end and returning from the other. The Wall has a Zen-like unity to it.

With help from a volunteer and a couple of anonymous visitors, Jones found Brady's name. It was low on the wall, so he knelt and placed a piece of paper over the name and with a pencil rubbed an impression.

"I didn't serve, myself," Jones said, his eyes moist.

"I didn't even know him," he said, haltingly.

Brady was the brother of a man Jones knew in Bakersfield, where he grew up.

"I just figured I could go to Bakersfield and let him know his brother is not forgotten: he's etched in stone," Jones said.

Standing, Jones looked around and wiped his eyes. "To see so many names," he said. "Oh!"

Nearby Doris Calvo was explaining to her 9-year-old son, Bryce, that "all of these people died in that war."

Bryce, who thought the Vietnam War might have been contemporary with World War I or maybe World War II, nevertheless got the point.

"This is kind of sad ---- and kind of respectful," the boy said.

To Joe Aponte, who accompanied Bryce and his mother, the endless roll of the lost was "like a reality check, especially in light of what's going on now in Iraq."

Lindsay McNeil and another woman clung to one another in the middle of the east wall, the two of them sobbing softly together.

"This is really hard for us," McNeil said. "Right now, my husband is over in Iraq."

Nearby, a visitor had thoughtfully left a box of Kleenex at the base of The Wall, where so many others had left flowers, portraits or family photos of someone who's name was engraved there, or other mementos. Near one end of the wall, tucked against its base next to a bouquet, lay an open presentation box containing an Army Commendation Medal with its white-striped green ribbon.

A woman who appeared to be in her mid 50s approached the wall, studied it and gasped. She would only give her name as Deirdre.

Deirdre said that her college sweetheart had gone to Vietnam with the 101st Airborne, and she never heard from him again. She had never met his family, and only learned much later that he had been killed there, apparently only a week after arriving.

She stared at the name on the wall, then withdrew to one of the hundreds of chairs arranged amphitheater style on the lawn in front of it.

Meanwhile, retired Marine Lt. Col. Charles Palmer of Vista took pictures of his wife, Marjorie, pointing to the name Thomas Hawking.

Palmer explained that, like Jones, he never met the man whose name Marjorie pointed out. But they were in Vietnam at the same time, at Cam Rahn Bay.

Hawking was a Marine Corps pilot who died supporting a Marine infantry unit in a furious fight.

According to Palmer, Hawking flew so low in his A-4 on Sept. 16, 1966, dropping napalm and strafing that he hit a treetop and crashed.

He knew nothing of this at the time, Palmer said. He learned of it after Hawking's widow married Marjorie's brother.

Jim Garrison and his girlfriend, Lisa Gillian, just came to pay their respects.

Garrison was a Marine in Vietnam in 1968, he said.

"It's pretty overpowering," he said of The Wall.

"I was telling Lisa it must have been just horrifying for the people left at home," he said.

"With Iraq, it's different, but it's the same," he said. "War! It just seems like such a waste. Later, you can remember the funny stuff, but there's other stuff you don't ever want to remember."

Someone asked him after he came home from Vietnam why he didn't just leave.

"I couldn't explain it to him; I was a Marine. But looking back, that would have been the only thing that would have made sense ---- just leave," he said.

After almost an hour sitting alone in the darkened amphitheater, Deirdre returned again to The Wall, to the place she had seen her college sweetheart's name. This time, she reached out and touched it, moving her fingers gently in the grooves that spelled his name.

She blinked her moistened eyes, and finally, after all those years, through trembling lips she said what she had come to say: "Goodbye."

Then she untouched The Wall, turned about, and stepped into the night.

Contact staff writer Edmond Jacoby at (760) 739-6675 or ejacoby@nctimes.com.

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