I COULD NOT BEAR it any longer, the anger, the bitterness, the wasting away. I spent more time in the fields, or at the small mill, or in the market arranging for the sale of our crops. And I spent time at home, studying, or with my family. My eight-and-one-half-month-old son was crawling everywhere, gnawing or gumming everything in the house. Gina and Michelle were blossoming into young ladies. Linda had earned her own office in Denton’s Ob-Gyn group. (To the chagrin and resentment of some of the physicians, Linda was more popular with the pregnant ladies than any of the docs.) And I spent time with my mother and father, too—feeling, being, becoming traditional American middle class. Even enjoying it.
At High Meadow the number of resident-vets dropped to nine with Denny Thorpe returning to Hagerstown armed with volumes of information on birth defects and VA compensation procedures; and Van Deusen, Mariano, Wagner, and Gallagher buying an old two-family house on the hill above the small mill. November came. Bobby’s health seemed to stabilize. My thirty-fifth birthday came and passed. In Washington, D.C.—after years of exile and expatriations—the nation finally welcomed its Viet Nam vets home. Or perhaps I should say we gave ourselves a welcome-home parade and a memorial, for it was Scruggs and Wheeler, two of our own, who were the prime movers behind the memorial. The dedication touched off a national reacceptance.
I missed the dedication ceremony. It is as important for a parent to spend his birthday with his children as it is for him to be there on their birthdays—it shows them they have something valuable to give, not just that they are valued and thus will receive. Bobby’s thought. He missed the ceremony too. A group of fifty High Meadow and ex-High Meadow vets went. They returned on Sunday, the fourteenth, with story after story. I went down, rode the Harley, had to, didn’t I? for Jimmy? went down alone in December, perhaps looking for greater distance, for escape from that rage, arrived late at night, in fog, mist, drizzle. A slight wind shifted the haze. The roar of jets from Dulles was the only distraction. I came around the corner. I will tell you it is not the same memorial today as it was in December 1982. At that time there were no lights, no stone walkways. There was mud. For the November dedication they had lain sod but hundreds of thousands of feet and poor drainage had destroyed it and the pit before the apex was—to me appropriately—thick, oozing muck. I had come in from Constitution Avenue, from the back where the top of the memorial is level with the ground, so from the back you see nothing at all—and in the low flowing mist and drizzle I was not even certain I was coming upon it. Then I made the corner, the west corner, the one closest to the Lincoln Memorial which in all its splendor and light was visible only as a glow, occasionally in thinner troughs of the moving mist, as an outline. Then the memorial, the first inch. A one-inch-high black polished stone. A pitiful, insignificant one inch. Inconsequential, much like the beginning of the involvement, a tiny wedge but one by forty inches. Then the first names, deaths. Step by step it grew. In the mist, in the dark, with the backglow from Lincoln not entering the pit, with the roar of unseen Dulles-bound jets unsettling. I could not see, focus upon, more than two or three panels, the one beside me, the one in front, the hazy one beyond, me not wishing to read the names, not yet, thinking this is all? This knee-high, waist-high wall, a memorial? More names. More names. Five per line, chest high, panel after panel, muck squishing from beneath my advancing feet, no longer able to see back, to see the beginning, to see the inconsequential thin wedge, unable to halt the descent, panel by forty-inch panel, the names, numbers, growing, slow steps, panels above my ears, over my head, blocking the sounds of the street, the city, capturing like a giant ear the overflight thunder, engulfing, enveloping, until the panels are more than ten feet, until I am submerged in the dark mist and the memorial itself, until I have descended through 29,000 names, 29,000 fallen with 29,000 fallen before me, reaching out, narrowing to the east, to the far inconsequential, insignificant wedge.
There is a man with a beard, ponytail, and headband, kneeling silently in the apex. I do not speak, do not acknowledge him, allow him the privacy of his prayer, his mourning. I am glad I am here, alone, here when there is no one except a kneeling figure. I advance. The east wall tapers. I slow. I do not yet know the order of names but have been told by others to look at 53 and 54 East, the panels that hold the dead from Dai Do. In the darkness, the mist, I cannot read, then can just barely read, but do not recognize any names, think to myself that I would not recognize them anyway because I do not remember the names anymore, maybe never knew some by other than a first name, or last, or moniker. Then I see, sense, Malnar, John Malnar, Big John, our sergeant major, then—it is strange, eerie, names emerge as if they want to be sensed, remembered, as if they come to me, as if they are branding irons, yet cold, dark, yet burning, searing my face, my mind, wanting me. I drop. My legs are liquid. My body has evaporated into the mist. I drop to knees I cannot feel, into mud I do not know is there. I am there with Manny, Emanuel, there with Harold, Richard, Robert, John, Carlos, William, Emmett, James ...
James ... I cannot move, do not move, cannot leave my brothers because they have reached out to me, hold me, touch me, and I them, them, eighty-one names from Dai Do, with me until I must find James, until I am sucked back down into the swirling vortex, amid tears, I am no longer, I am mist in the dark mist of flowing spirits clinging to the earth, come with me to find James, Jimmy, panel 14 West, I’d walked by him, by him without noticing, by him on the original descent without knowing.