6
IF YOU’RE NOT LOOKING FOR IT, the Duwayne Soulier Memorial Post in Red Cliff, Wisconsin, is easy to miss. Though the sign out front announces, “VFW and Auxiliary Post 8239—Public Welcome,” the unassuming single-story building sits atop a gently sloping lawn, slightly elevated from the road. A pair of picnic tables and some wrought iron chairs crowd a narrow stretch of concrete patio just outside, spillover seating when they fire up the grill for a fundraiser or veterans gathering. The interior matches the exterior. Nothing fancy or flashy, unless you count the neon Green Bay Packers sign in the front window.
While I don’t have many other VFW posts to compare it with, it seems to me that the Duwayne Soulier Memorial Post is a pretty special place, for all its ordinariness. Cans of beer and pop are cold and cheap. Though they volunteer their hours, the bartenders know what they’re about, as do the customers; or, more to the point, they know each other—who drinks Budweiser or Miller Lite or Diet Coke and when they’re ready for another. There aren’t really tabs, as people arrange dollar bills and quarters on the bar as they go. Randy, the post’s quartermaster, doesn’t talk much; Diane, an auxiliary member and regular behind the bar, doesn’t put up with cursing. The barstools are comfortable, and the place is always clean. Sunday afternoons in the fall draw a crowd for the football game and a potluck meal, and on a good day, that brings its own tradition. Every time the Packers score a touchdown, a bottle of Sour Apple Pucker Schnapps comes out, and someone makes the rounds, filling up each person’s thimble-sized Dixie cup. A shout rings out—“Let’s Go Packers!”—and down the hatch goes the bright-green, Jolly-Rancher-sweet liquor. On Applefest weekend, the peninsula’s fabled harvest celebration, the post hosts a pancake breakfast fundraiser. For a few dollars a plate, you get two apple pancakes and two links of sausage, fresh off the griddle, with a side of homemade brown-sugar butter.
Though people of all ages from the community come to the post—as Randy put it, “this place has been used for everything from baby showers to funerals, birthdays and weddings”—there was a time when it almost folded. Post 8239 was originally chartered in June 1969, and its founding members were mostly World War II veterans, not all of whom embraced veterans of the war in Southeast Asia. For decades they lacked a permanent meeting site, moving instead from bar to bar in the area. By 2003, “with depleted membership and a tiny, wood-framed clubhouse with few amenities, the organization appeared near death, and remaining members were informed by the national organization that because of the post’s inactivity, its charter would be canceled.”1 Spearheaded by its commander at the time, Danny Gordon, a friend of Merl Allen and one of the first Vietnam War veterans I met in the community, the post pushed to revive its numbers, to find a new home, and, most importantly, to rename the Red Cliff VFW in memory of Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier. They eventually settled on the current property, which had been gifted to the post for a dollar by another vet, Joe Pascale. People like Randy Bresette and Butch Kuepfer, its commander, rejoined after a lapse of several years; with their children grown up, they had more time on their hands. In 2006, the members decided to gut and expand the existing structure, what had been a little hamburger joint, eventually doubling it in size. They wanted to remain debt free, so everything came from donations, either individual gifts of money or material, or through the numerous fundraisers they held. Randy did the lion’s share of the work on the building’s construction. Though he himself was not a veteran, Larry Soulier (known by everyone in the community as Bootin or Boot) also donated hundreds of dollars in labor and material. Given its namesake, Randy explained, “He’s got an affinity and an affection towards this post.”2
We often think of commemorations for war dead as highly orchestrated events—that is, the kind of eye-catching, ceremonial fanfare that marks national holidays like Memorial Day, July 4th, or Veterans Day or that is on display for special occasions like Lance Corporal Merlin Allen’s or Captain Darrell Spinler’s homecoming. But commemoration can take more mundane shape; it can come in the form of everyday acts or more gradually accruing communal gestures, like a rehabilitated VFW post, whose windows are bought one by one, or flooring laid and siding hammered through the gift of labor. Akin to the monuments and ceremonies Jay Winter describes in the wake of the Great War, within such gestures and gifts, the living dedicate themselves to “good works among their fellow men and women. Grief and indebtedness, sadness and personal commitment are the pillars of local commemoration.”3 These quotidian forms and places of remembrance reveal a side of the MIA accounting process that tends to go less noticed—what families, veterans, and communities do when the missing haven’t yet returned, or may never return. In appreciating these commemorative practices, we can see how local memory reckons with unfulfilled obligations, just as rituals at sites like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (the “Wall”) in Washington, DC, grapple with the unfinished work of MIA accounting on the national stage.
These less scripted modes of remembrance necessarily grapple with unresolved absence, and in doing so, they expose a particular friction within the US military’s MIA accounting efforts: despite the state’s fervent pledges of “fullest possible accounting,” some—even beyond those already considered unrecoverable (for example, those lost at sea)—will remain missing in action or killed in action / body not recovered indefinitely, perhaps permanently. There may be no homecoming. For obvious reasons, this fact fuels frustration; measured against its cultivated ethos of exceptional care, the state has effectively reneged on its end of the social contract with the service member and thus also with his or her surviving kin. By no means exclusive to the conflict in Southeast Asia and its missing war dead, such a perceived abrogation of responsibility nevertheless compounds the particular sting of that war’s betrayals and thus demands action. When raised expectations go unmet, official attention turns to ferreting out failure and assigning blame. Congress ups the ante, expands the mission, insists on greater efficiency.
But if nothing else, we can glean from the examples of Merl Allen and Darrell Spinler that caring for missing war dead is never strictly the purview of the state. The missing service members belong to grieving families and communities just as much, if not more, than to a “grateful” nation. Thus, the Vietnam veterans slogan, “Bring them home or send us back,” finds it echo in the Patriot Guard Riders’ pledge to honor the fallen and help escort remains home. Or the Delta Air Lines honor guard. Or the flag-lined streets of small Midwestern towns. Or a family’s decision to bury their loved one next to his parents in a hometown cemetery rather than Arlington National Cemetery. So when the unaccounted for remain unaccounted for, it comes as no surprise that families, veterans, and their communities take memory matters into their own hands. In doing so, they push back against the problematic assumptions of “closure”—that byproduct of a therapeutic culture so often invoked by mainstream media in their coverage of the accounting mission. When decades have since passed and there is no resolution in sight, closure doesn’t fit. MIA families already know well the phrase’s limits.
In the face of prolonged and likely permanent absence, some relatives instead improvise their own rites of reclamation, their own ways of welcoming home those who will never return. Occasionally folded into larger commemorations, such events may also acknowledge the fraught homecoming for veterans who returned alive but not to the pageantry afforded the missing war dead recovered four and five decades later. They may make use of existing memorial spaces, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the nation’s capital or a VFW post in northern Wisconsin. Whether bigger or smaller in scale, public or private, planned or impromptu, these memorial practices offer a modest corrective to the expected end, the aim and destination of MIA accounting. They hint at an alternate vocabulary, distinct from the science-inflected language of remembrance embraced by the state and mainstream media.
“Join us to honor and remember”
Earlier I described a feature at the Duwayne Soulier Memorial Post that materialized the community’s experience of military service and loss, particularly from the Vietnam War. There is a wall—it’s actually spilling onto a second one these days—covered with the photographs of veterans and members, living and deceased, from World War I to active duty. In the very center, at the threshold between the two sides—the living and the dead—is Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier’s framed collage with his photograph, service medals, and a pencil rubbing of his name from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Lost over sea and thus deemed unrecoverable, he is the one “who will never come home.” To his left are photographs of Merl Allen and Jimmy Hessing—the one who came home forty-six years later and the one who came home right away, respectively. For Butch, the VFW post commander, it was only right that their photos were grouped together. “It’s just that this little community having three veterans killed over in Vietnam, it just ties all the families together.”4 When Casey Allen addressed the crowd assembled at his brother’s memorial service, he too made sure to note that the Bayfield community sacrificed not only his twenty-year-old brother, but also twenty-year-old Private First Class Duwayne Marshall Soulier and twenty-one-year-old Corporal James William Hessing.5 For his own part, Randy saw how the stories of the three young men had become braided into the fabric of local memory, across generations:
When you think of one of them, the other two just automatically come to mind. My granddaughter when she was a junior in high school went on a trip to Washington, DC, and she had been here [at the post] enough times. And she ended up at the Wall. So the next time she came up here she said, “Grandpa, look what I got!” She said, “Here’s the rubbings from the Wall.” I said, “How’d you know that?” She said, “I just looked at it [the post’s wall of photographs] every year and I remembered.”6
A soft-spoken man, Randy didn’t recount the story casually; his voice and expression telegraphed how much it meant that his granddaughter had remembered the three—strangers to her, but men whose lives—lost lives—affected her grandfather profoundly. Butch and others were quick to explain that the post ran in large part because of the countless hours Randy put in behind the bar and organizing events. He was the backbone of the place. And when he fell ill in 2017, those who stepped in to cover his shifts couldn’t quite believe the commitment he had shouldered day in and day out over the years. It was also his idea originally to collect the photographs and arrange them on the wall, and to make the three Vietnam War dead the centerpiece of its recognition.7
More than just a space for the living veterans to gather and socialize, the post plays a specific commemorative role in Red Cliff and the wider community. Jimmy Hessing was buried in Greenwood Cemetery on the outskirts of Bayfield, where his father and much later his mother joined him; Merl Allen was buried next to his parents on York Island. Wotsy, on the other hand, has no gravestone. In its absence, Post 8239 has become his memorial site—a place where the public is welcome but also where local veterans, family, and friends keep an informal vigil through the clubhouse’s day-to-day operations and activities. On April 30, 2017, one day shy of the fiftieth anniversary of his death, however, the family decided it was time to commemorate Wotsy publicly and explicitly through a modest ceremony at the post. “Join us to honor and remember Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier,” the flyer read. At the invitation of Bootin and his wife, Rose, I traveled to Red Cliff to be there and take part in the day’s events.
I arrived at the post early that morning to find one of Wotsy’s sisters, Cindy, and his nephew Jimmy already spreading the thin plastic tablecloths over the banquet tables and strategizing about where to place the various crockpots, paper plates, and plastic cutlery. It was my first signal that the day’s memorializing would entail more than just speeches and military rituals; remembering Wotsy meant sharing a meal together in his honor. And what a meal it would be. Within a few short hours, the serving tables were loaded up with huge warming trays of mashed potatoes, turkey in gravy, meatballs in gravy, sliced ham, fresh fried whitefish, rutabaga, wild rice casserole, coleslaw, fruit salad, and the like. To the side, on the dessert table, someone had placed an enormous white-frosted sheet cake decorated with Wotsy’s photograph, the same headshot of him in his utility uniform and helmet that hangs at the center of the post’s wall of photographs. Inside the fluted blue borders, red icing spelled out the phrases “In Loving Memory” … “You Are Not Forgotten” to frame the edible photo cake topper. A little red-icing heart punctuated the message. There had been some panic about the cake—a local bakery had taken the order but when the day drew near, no one returned the family’s calls. And so in a pinch, they turned to the bakery department at the Walmart in nearby Ashland. Everyone was pleased with how it turned out. While we finished preparing the tables, outside on the lawn, Bootin, Randy, and others assembled another tent and set up a white tarp to shield the area from the gradually rising wind. The gray skies promised an unseasonably cold spring day.
With a couple of hours before guests would arrive, Jimmy and I headed over to the Red Cliff casino to grab some breakfast, and there we had a chance to talk more generally about his uncles, his family, and the contrast between Red Cliff and Bayfield, between the Native American community, the white residents, and the lopsided development, spurred by burgeoning tourism, of upscale restaurants, hotels, and boutiques. (“Who names a restaurant the Fat Radish?” Bootin once joked.) On our way back to the post, we drove through the old reservation, where Jimmy had spent summers as a child. At the time, he explained, he had dreaded coming north—he grew up in Milwaukee, where his mother had moved and eventually met his father; he didn’t like the feeling that he was the “white” kid, the interloper from the city. These days, trips to Red Cliff are a welcome chance to spend time with his uncle, go golfing on the peninsula, and enjoy Rose’s “boiled” dinners (a local dish that involves a pot full of simmered meat, vegetables, and fist-sized dumplings). Here was Bootin’s old home, he pointed out as we drove along; here was his grandmother’s property; here was the stretch of lawn that the kids would take to get down to the shimmering lake. There was no indoor plumbing, he remembered. Instead they relied on a communal pump and outhouses—dispossession of another order, with a deeper historical grain. Later I would ask Randy and Butch about the demographics of the post—that is, about its makeup in terms of Native American versus white veterans. “About 90 percent Native,” they explained. While the number made sense given the post’s location in Red Cliff, it also intersected with larger national trends. In his pioneering study of Native American combatants and veterans of the Vietnam War, Tom Holm argues that “factors of low economic and educational levels” combined with “a very youthful population (the average age of Native Americans in the period of the Vietnam War was between 19 and 21) virtually assured that most Indian males would be primary candidates for military service,” and within that service “be very likely to become infantrymen and experience combat in Vietnam.” Like other racial minorities who served in the war, they “bore a disproportionate share of fighting.” Indeed, more than forty-two thousand Native Americans served in Southeast Asia between 1960 and 1973, with 250 of them dying there, Wotsy among them, killed in action / body not recovered.8
The cake for Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier’s remembrance gathering.
The conversation with Jimmy and the tour through the reservation helped contextualize the commemoration at the post that day, where tribal rituals joined military tradition in honoring the community’s one remaining missing war dead. Though on a smaller scale than Merl Allen’s homecoming—there were no Patriot Guard Riders, no remains to escort along Highway 13—the chance to “honor and remember” Duwayne (Wotsy) Soulier gathered people from near and far in similarly widened bonds of kinship. Among those who traveled from out of state was Wotsy’s unit commander (team leader) Stan Pace, who had flown in from Kentucky the day before. As the post began to fill up with relatives, neighbors, and veterans, Stan talked with Marilyn Neff (Merl Allen’s sister), who had come with her husband, Ralph, to pay their respects. As he recounted the events leading up to Wotsy’s death, how the young man ended up on a medevac helicopter that had crashed into the South China Sea just a few hundred yards away from the hospital ship, he had to turn away and regain his composure. Marilyn reached out to touch his arm; she told him she understood how hard it was to talk about it.
At noon, the ceremony began with a rite of military homage. Filing in to the recorded strains of bagpipes playing “Going Home,” members of the post, the American Legion in Bayfield, and the Apostle Islands Honor Guard, as well as other attending veterans, made their way, one by one, to stand before Wotsy’s photograph. Once there, each saluted the image, turned, and walked on. There wasn’t much room for maneuvering, with all the seats taken and people standing two rows deep toward the back. After an introduction by Butch and an address by the Bayfield County veteran service officer, it was time for the speeches. First came family—Bootin and his two sisters each taking a turn before the microphone to recount stories and reflect on who their brother was to them, not as a US Marine, but as their sibling, a fun-loving teenager with a sentimental streak. Bootin told how Wotsy once had a job working alongside him in a metal fabricating plant. Wotsy kept tracing the name of a girl he liked—Linda—on the metal’s surface. Finger oil leaves a mark, even when painted over, Bootin explained, and so he would have to rework and repaint each piece his brother had processed to get rid of “Linda.” Eventually, he told his little brother to knock it off with Linda’s name. The crowd laughed. Cindy followed suit with a story of how, when they were in high school, a new boyfriend had swung by their home to pick her up for a date. He walked right up to the house, something she had desperately not wanted him to do; her family was moving the outhouse that day, and the pit hadn’t yet been dug. So the boyfriend pitched in for her. Wotsy gave his little sister a hard time—not just for shirking her duty, but for sloughing off the chore onto her hapless date. She chuckled as she recalled his scolding her, “You shit in it, you should help move it!” The last of the three to speak was Darlene, the oldest of the siblings but the smallest in stature, a petite woman with a quiet manner and quieter voice. She explained that she had already left the house when Wotsy was a young boy; her memories of him were more distant, both in terms of time and force. She peered out at the crowd, almost bewildered by the moment, and uttered her simple tribute. “He was my little brother.” From there, others among the gathering rose to tell stories of Wotsy in high school, of a yearbook party when Merl Allen called out, “Wotsy, it’s the Watusi!” and how each brother grabbed his sister, the two pairs cutting it up to the 1960s dance craze. Mary Defoe read aloud the poem she had written years ago, the beautiful reckoning of youth cut short and the disbelief that followed. At its end, she declared, and heads nodded in agreement, “Everyone loved Wotsy. Everyone loved Wotsy.”
Making his way slowly to the front of the room, Stan Pace stood before the crowd as the sole voice from Wotsy’s military service. Though there were plenty of Vietnam vets in attendance, Stan was the only one who had actually served alongside Wotsy. Recalling the young man he knew by the nickname of “Chief,” a marine under his command in the Seventh Communications Battalion, First Division, he told the story of what had happened, of how Wotsy had sustained injuries and another marine was killed when their jeep ran over a mine while they were on a mail run. He took pains to stress that Wotsy had been thus wounded and was not sick with a fever, as some of the military records indicate.9 “Don’t let anyone tell you differently.” Wotsy’s condition was severe enough that he had to be transported—medevaced—first to the hospital in nearby Chu Lai, and then to a navy hospital ship anchored twelve miles off the coast of the Quảng Tín Province. He later learned that the chopper had crashed into the sea. On the edge of tears, he confessed that he had been “carrying around [Wotsy’s] ghost for the last fifty years.” There was a moment of stillness, of hesitation, and then Butch stepped forward to embrace him. Later, Stan would tell me that he wouldn’t have missed the day, the chance to honor his fellow marine, for anything.
The speeches and words of remembrance tacked between the two profiles—Wotsy as a sibling, classmate, friend, even a high school crush, and Duwayne Soulier as a marine who died in service to his country but whose remains never came home. On the whole, remarks addressing the latter were long on a sense of sacrifice but short on breathless patriotism. Not that it wasn’t a crowd that honored military service, or the nation, for that matter—far from it—but the Vietnam War’s price of dispossession had left its particular mark. As one Vietnam vet pronounced with an edge of anger in his voice, “The US government cuts blank checks when it sends people off to war. And it cashed those checks with these three men.” Here again, Wotsy’s memory was inextricably entwined with Jimmy Hessing’s and Merl Allen’s—the three Bayfield youth lost to the war in Southeast Asia.
More than just sharing memorial space with a localized, personalized portrait of Wotsy, the notion of “national” sacrifice likewise encompassed dual meanings. Duwayne Soulier was a member of the Chippewa Nation, namely, the Red Cliff Band of the Lake Superior Chippewa, and the ceremony that followed the speeches paired military rites with tribal ritual in honoring both his memory and his spirit. After Butch read aloud a final dedication to Private First Class Duwayne Soulier, the honor detail of the VFW Post 8239, with white gloves and shouldered rifles, exited the building to perform the requisite rifle salute. Though they lacked the precision of the Old Guard sentinels at the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, their deliberate movements echoed the salutes they each had given Wotsy at the ceremony’s opening. The volleys rocked the air three times, and then off to the side a bugler played taps. It was a beautiful rendition, its clear notes muffled only by the tent tarps flapping in the biting wind.
Once the military ritual closed, the Native tradition began. Dressed in a gray track suit, a spiritual leader from the Red Cliff Band lit a ceremonial pipe and offered the smoke to the four directions. Then, speaking in the Ojibwe language, he said a prayer in honor of Wotsy, words of a different nation recognizing a warrior’s sacrifice in its own terms. As soon as he finished, his partner, a younger man in a brightly embroidered black vest, began a song, his voice oscillating to the beat of the hand drum he played. To his right, the neon Packers sign remained unlit in the post’s window. Once the ceremony ended, the spiritual leader invited us back into the building to begin the feast in remembrance of Wotsy. He blessed the food. Holding a plate aloft, he explained that he had prepared a spirit offering from the potluck fare, which he would take directly to Wotsy’s mother’s grave. Without a burial site for Wotsy, his mother’s headstone was the next proper place to leave the offering. Then the meal began. The little building soon buzzed with voices and laughter as people fell into conversation over plates of food cooked in honor of Duwayne “Wotsy” Soulier KIA / BNR.
I PULLED OUT OF THE LITTLE SAND BAY CAMPGROUND with my headlights off, guided by the dark shapes of the trees bordering the road. I didn’t want to wake the other campers. It was 4:20 a.m., and I had exactly twenty minutes to make it to Bootin’s driveway—“look for the mailbox covered in ivy”—if I wanted to join him and his brother-in-law Junior out on the lake. Retirement for Bootin had meant returning to commercial fishing, a livelihood that once dominated the peninsula’s economy and for members of the Red Cliff Band still drew on tribal rights tied to the sacred waters of their ancestors. During fishing season (from late November through early October), every other morning, he and Junior (Rose’s brother) cast off from the dock at the Bayfield marina and headed out onto the lake to haul in their sometimes prodigious, sometimes meager, catches of whitefish and lake trout and then reset their hundred-yard-long gill nets in the deep channels off the shores of the Apostle Islands. The day before this particular morning, I had been sitting with Bootin and a few others at the casino bar, nursing a Coke and catching up on area news. I had returned to Red Cliff and Bayfield a couple of months after Wotsy’s remembrance ceremony to follow up with some interviews about the VFW post, Merl Allen’s homecoming, and the like. When Bootin mentioned that he and Junior were fishing the next morning, I asked if I could tag along.
In the shadows of that liminal sky, not yet morning but no longer night, we stepped onto the fish tug, and without a single word exchanged between them (as would be their habit for the majority of the day), Bootin and Junior set to work readying the gear and then guiding the boat out of the marina. The eastern horizon hinted at dawn; it was not yet 5:00 a.m., and the water was smooth as glass. As we gathered speed, I leaned into the frame of the open sliding door starboard side and took in the cool air. Theirs is a commercial vessel with all the attendant smells—fish guts overlaid with rusted steel, grease, weathered twine, and Pine-Sol. The minutes passed in relative silence but for the steady rumble of the diesel-fueled engine, and I watched the sky gradually gain its color. Bootin stepped over and pointed to a spot on the horizon; get ready, in a couple of seconds, he told me, the sun would rise there. And so it did, its pinkish-red orb piercing the line between the water and sky. I’ve thought a lot about that day on the boat, watching the two men in their wordless choreography of synchronized labor, pulling in and letting out the nets, untangling gills from the yards of unspooling mesh and tossing the slippery catch into the plastic bins, which they topped off with crushed ice, and later, homeward bound, flinging a few whitefish out the back to the bald eagles that had learned to chase the vessel in hopes of their just reward. There was a sad symmetry to Bootin’s lifelong work on the lake, casting his nets deep into the water to see what they might ensnare, while halfway around the globe, his brother’s remains lie on an ocean floor, as of yet undetected and likely too deep for a US military underwater archaeology team to recover. Bootin is not a man to complain or pontificate. When I asked him once what he thought of his brother’s enlisting in the marines, he told me, “It was up to him.” Did he know what he was getting into? He nodded his head, “I think so.” He and his sisters have never actively pushed for answers or demanded action on their brother’s case; they have never attended a government briefing or traveled to Washington, DC, for the National League of POW / MIA Families annual meeting. This doesn’t mean that they don’t care, or that they’ve forgotten, or that they wouldn’t be thrilled if someday they picked up the phone to hear the words, “Your brother’s remains have been identified.” But in acknowledging the circumstances of his death and thus the likely impossible conditions of his recovery, they’ve made do with their own modes of commemoration. They’ve visited the Wall and taken rubbings of his name. Members of the auxiliary, they’re staunch supporters of the local VFW post; beyond his help with the physical structure, Bootin has flipped pancakes and burgers as part of its charity work for the community. He spends an hour or two a couple of times a week visiting with friends at its bar. He and Rose, his sisters and their families, invited friends, neighbors, local veterans, and tribal members to join them in remembering Wotsy fifty years after his death. They do their best to keep his memory alive, and they share their gratitude with the Red Cliff community and especially the Vietnam War vets at the post who have helped them in that task.
Lawrence “Bootin” Soulier with his lake trout catch.
Last Known Alive
Both in their more informal memory work and the support they enjoy (and appreciate) from their respective communities, Bootin and his sisters have a lot in common with Pam Cain, the daughter of an air force pilot missing in action since 1966, not yet recovered. And while they share the bond of grappling with five decades of absence, their experiences also differ in striking ways. Pam is an MIA daughter who lost her father at age twelve. His status for many years was carried as “last known alive,” yet another subset within the government’s “unaccounted for” category. Unlike Wotsy or Merl Allen or Darrell Spinler, there was evidence to suggest that her father may have survived his aircraft’s being shot down. As a child and later the spouse of a service member, Pam has lived in different parts of the country, including in the Washington, DC, metro area, and she has been actively engaged in the POW / MIA accounting issue for over three decades, serving on the National League of POW / MIA Families’ board of directors since 2007. Standing before the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Father’s Day 2012, she explained, “I do everything I can to remind the government that he needs to come home.”10 An articulate, determined advocate for the accounting mission, Pam doesn’t cast herself as a policy wonk or Beltway insider on the “issue.” Rather, her activism centers on the need to educate the public and support families who struggle with the effects of the Vietnam War, namely, the uncertainty inherent in the unaccounted-for category, what the league’s former executive director Ann Mills-Griffiths calls the more “touchy-feely stuff.” In fact, the first time I met Pam was at a workshop on “Dealing with Ambiguous Loss,” which she chaired at the 2016 annual league meeting and government briefing.11
Perhaps more than any other case I encountered, the circumstances of Pam’s father’s loss and her family’s experiences with the US government’s MIA accounting efforts capture the thorny dimensions of an uncertain fate resulting from a deeply contentious war. Major Oscar Mauterer, posthumously promoted to Colonel Mauterer, was last seen alive on February 15, 1966, by the pilot of the lead plane in a two-plane mission flying cover over Khammouan Province in Laos: “He was observed to bail out, deploy a good parachute and descend to the ground in an area heavily populated with enemy forces.”12 A career pilot with the air force, he had volunteered to serve in Vietnam. “It was the old ‘service to country,’ ” Pam explained. Though later he would express disillusion with aspects of the American campaign, nevertheless, “he felt the government had put a lot of money into him and his training, and he needed to be there.” Pam remembers the day he left for the war; she recalls fondly how he insisted on coming home to Washington, DC, to spend Thanksgiving with his kids (rather than having her mother fly out to Hawaii for the usual allotted R&R); and then there’s the day she learned he had been shot down:
It’s been fifty-one years, and I can remember it like it was yesterday. I was in junior high and I walked home, as I always do, and I got to my street and I saw my grandparents’ car parked out front. Again, we were going to go see them that same weekend so, “Why are they down here?” And I got to the front door and I walked in and my mother was at the top of the steps wearing sunglasses with tears streaming down her face. And my grandparents—her parents—were there. And I knew right away, and she said something’s happened to Dad. And from that moment on, obviously, my life changed.13
Then Major Oscar Mauterer, Bien Hoa Air Base, Vietnam, 1965.
Pam Cain with her father, Oscar Mauterer, Chitose Air Base, Japan, July 1956.
With their family based in Washington, DC, at the time, Pam recalls how the tense circumstances in the nation’s capital compounded her anxiety at the news of her father being shot down. “It was a really tumultuous time. It really started hitting me with the riots and the protests, and then what was happening at home to me and to us. We were getting phone calls, really nasty, awful phone calls. ‘Your dad, your husband, got what he deserved.’ The whole baby killer thing.14 Other calls saying, ‘We know where he is. We have evidence.’ ” To not pick up the phone risked missing vital news, and so Pam’s mother answered the calls. The family—namely her mother—had been told that he was shot down over Laos, notably, at a time when the United States was not officially “in” Laos. They were instructed not to share information with anyone; they were not to speak to the media, “because you’re going to put your husband, your father, in possible danger.” The isolation weighed heavily on the family, as did the sense of dependence on the US government. Pam’s parents had had conversations before her father left about “what if.” He had told her mother, “Listen to what the government tells you.” He had had faith in its capacity to care for his family, if he himself should not return.
But that was the great uncertainty—would he return? Although he fell into the category of last known alive, Oscar Mauterer never “made it into the prison system”; his name never appeared on any official POW lists. Given the report that he parachuted to ground in an area controlled by enemy forces, to Pam’s mind, someone should have known what happened to him. The fact of his purported survival also complicated the search and recovery process. “Then it became like looking for a needle in a haystack because they weren’t just looking for a crash site,” she explained. “They knew he wasn’t there,” at the site where the plane had gone down. “I’m growing up, and I’m going, well, if you’re not looking for the crash site, what are you looking for? You’re looking for one man in a country where we weren’t supposed to be.” Years would pass during which time Pam, her mother, and her younger brother heeded the government’s directive to stay silent and await news. Periodically, with the war still unfolding, her mother was asked to come to the Air Force Casualty Office to look at POW photographs, to see if her husband’s visage was among them. He never was.
It wasn’t until her late twenties that Pam became mobilized as an MIA family member. Sitting in the chapel at Fort Myer, just outside the gates of Arlington National Cemetery, at the memorial service for her father—a service the family had decided to hold around the time the US government was declaring the presumption of death for its missing in action—for the first time, she felt deeply angry.15 “We are doing this but not one damn thing has changed.” She became actively involved in advocating for her father’s case, joining the National League of POW / MIA Families; she traveled to Washington, DC, (by then she lived in California) for the annual briefings; she met other MIA children and compared stories. It was an eye-opening experience. After the first league meeting, she called her mother to say, “We have to talk.” Pam’s engagement with the league led to her mother’s own epiphany, albeit a painful one. “She was devastated, not only by losing her husband,” but by her guilt over what she perceived to be her own passivity and naïveté in remaining quiet, in “believing what she was hearing,” and in not joining the league sooner. For years, mother and daughter would attend the annual meetings and push for developments on Mauterer’s case. Pam promised her mother she would bring him home to her, a pledge made that much more pressing when Pam’s mother was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002.
Forty-four years after Colonel Oscar Mauterer parachuted to the ground in Laos, never to be heard of again, Pam received a text message, a request from the Joint POW / MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) for additional photographs of her father. “And I was smart enough at that point to keep my mouth shut and just say, yes, I’m sending you pictures. And I to this day travel with a thumb drive on which I have a lot of his stuff, photos, etc. And so ten minutes later they had their pictures. And very shortly thereafter—and again this is all kind of backchannel, it’s not through a letter and an investigation—I got a report saying that the photo was Dad.” Pam pressed to see the image for herself; several weeks later, she attended “The Ride Home,” an event in Georgia marking National POW / MIA Recognition Day, where JPAC personnel were also present:
They put it up on the computer, and we were all in a hotel room. And I saw the picture. And, um, it was Dad [her voice breaks]. Yeah, I didn’t need any dental records, it was Dad. [In the photograph] He’s reposed. He’s in his flight suit, you can see part of the harness.… Do I know that somebody who’s unconscious is dead? Do I know if that was a staged photo? Do we? So you know, you have all those questions. They did say and you can see there’s a little, almost a little wound, kind of here [points at her temple] and you could see, and they said that they brushed away the blood. Well, that could be somebody shot him. I don’t know how you get that bailing out. So again, a lot of questions.
While the discovery of the photograph definitively removed Colonel Oscar Mauterer from the “Last Known Alive” list, the field investigation that had produced it also yielded firsthand witnesses who claimed to know the precise whereabouts of his remains. Members of a North Vietnamese Army unit tasked with locating an American pilot who had bailed from his air craft confirmed that Mauterer was dead (the witnesses claimed he was already dead when they found him) and that they had buried his body, all but his boots, which were too big; those they left nearby the hastily dug grave. In 2014, following a site survey, the 131st Joint Field Activity, carried out by US and Laotian personnel, excavated the area believed to be the burial location. To Pam and her family’s great disappointment, no remains were recovered. Pam’s mother died in 2015.
For Pam Cain, a tension exists between wanting to continue to push the US government to recover her father’s remains—chase down every lead and bring even some small part of him home, to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery—and ceding those hypothetical resources to other families. “I find myself fighting a lot of emotions now about [whether I am] asking too much. Am I at the point where, you know, again, other families don’t have what I have? And so I do fight that battle of whether I should—I can’t let go—but should I be content with what I have so that other families have a chance?” There is one thing, however, very clear in her mind. No amount of time passed and not even the news of her father’s recovery and identification will bring her that seemingly prized condition of “closure,” a term, as psychologist Pauline Boss and poet Donna Carnes explain, that posits “not only a mythical, unobtainable goal, but also an especially unhealthy goal to expect of those who must carry ambiguous loss, for years or even a lifetime.”16 For Pam, a trained professional in social work who chose to specialize in grief, hospice, and senior care, the notion of closure fails to apprehend the range of hope that she and her family endured over the years: hope that he might have survived, but also hope that he wasn’t tortured; hope that he died swiftly and painlessly; hope that his remains would be recovered and identified; hope that this would happen before her mother passed away from cancer; and now hope that it might occur while Pam and her brother are still alive. Undergirding it all is the recognition that her father’s ambiguous absence has been a constant presence in her life since age twelve.
Closure. I really hate that word. Even if my dad ever comes home, I will never have closure. I lost my dad at a time in my life and his life, the whole circumstances of the war. You know, just everything about it. That will never be ok. If I can accept it, yeah. And I think in terms, I think, I know that I’ve accepted that he’s dead. By now, I mean, he’d be an old old old man, and I hope that he didn’t go through some of the torture. And I’m pretty certain that he probably died earlier on after his shoot down, rather than later, which for years, again, we didn’t know. But that whole thing of ambiguous loss, it’s all encapsulated in that, to me—that whole sense of ambiguous loss. That grief, that loss, stays with you, you know?
Some people go, oh well, you live in the past, or you need to move on. Well, I’ve grown up. I went to college. I had a career—I have a career. I have a family. I think I’ve kind of done the usual things that we do in life. I’ve been very happy in the things I’ve done.… But my dad will always always be that something that is not closed. It’s just still an open thing.
Countering that gap, that “open thing,” Pam has crafted her own rituals of remembrance.17 In the most abstract sense, her advocacy within the MIA community itself serves as a way of memorializing her father; it connects her loss to something larger, to lives beyond her own and those of her immediate family: “Even if I get accountability for my dad, I’ll never ever walk away from this.” Like Bootin’s gifts of labor at the Red Cliff post, indebtedness and grief, sadness and personal commitment, form the backbone of her commemorative activism. That said, she also has her more material rites and places of honoring her father’s memory. Even though the earth below it shelters no remains, her father’s headstone in Arlington grants her a “little bit of peace, a little bit of solace.” Each year, on Christmas, February 15, Father’s Day, his birthday, and National POW / MIA Recognition Day, she sends flowers to be placed at its base. It sits on a hill in a memorial section, surrounded by others—not just from the Vietnam War—for whom the headstones are likewise symbolic. Indeed, Pam knows several of the families whose unaccounted-for loved ones have markers there as well, and often when she visits her father’s tombstone, she finds herself speaking to them. She’s taken her grandson there; he placed a little rock on top of his great-grandfather’s marker. “And because the cemetery doesn’t like balloons,” she explains with a mischievous smile, “I always put balloons.”
At the Wall
On the bright, cold morning of Veterans Day, November 11, 2017, Maya Lin stepped to the podium before her black granite creation—once derided as a “black gash of shame and sorrow”—to give special remarks at the thirty-fifth anniversary of the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.18 “I envisioned cutting open the earth and polishing its open sides. The walls would not be massive but instead thin and light, so the names alone become the object,” she explained. But the names were also to do particular work—to conjoin the living and the dead in the sociality of reflection. “The walls would be polished to a mirror’s shine, so you see yourself reflected in the names.… And that as you descend, the names rise up to meet you. And that you would be able to find your time on the wall, and connect with your fallen colleagues. I was intently focused on creating a work that would talk to each one of you individually yet also to have you seam together as a family. So that you and your service would become a part of the very fabric of this country.”19 But what of those who inhabited (or continue to inhabit) that ambiguous state of missing in action, or, its subset, like Pam Cain’s father, last known alive? How does the monument as a permanent testament to the devastation of war—albeit one side of it—address the uncertainty surrounding these individual service members within that social fabric and yet leave open the possibility for resolution of their fates?20 With the design still in planning, the National League of POW / MIA Families waged a pitched battle to preserve not only the sanctity of, but also the critical political distinction between, the POW / MIA and KIA categories. By such logic, flattening the differences between the missing (even if bureaucratically presumed dead) and the definitively dead undercut the urgency to account for the POWs / MIAs—not unlike the league’s initial resistance to interring an Unknown Soldier of the Vietnam War in Arlington National Cemetery because the act might signal the end to concerted POW / MIA accounting efforts.21 At first, the league rejected even the MIA names’ inclusion on the Wall; but if they were to appear on its granite panels, the league refused to support the design’s uniform listing of MIAs and KIAs, going so far as to obtain a restraining order to stop the memorial’s construction.22 “We explained to them, ‘We will stop you because we will not put our missing men’s names on the wall as killed in action.’ Just won’t do it. We’re working too hard, so we’ve got to find a way.”23 Eventually, the two sides agreed on a symbol of two equidistant intersecting lines to be etched next to the names of the missing in action, in contrast to the diamond symbol beside those killed in action. “It’s not a cross,” Ann Mills-Griffiths is quick to point out because “not all missing in action were Christians.”24
Once an individual MIA is accounted for, the equidistant lines are filled in to create a diamond. If an individual were to return alive, the lines would be surrounded by a circle. To date, no circles have been drawn.25
For many MIA families, in the absence of a grave, the Wall with its names and its equidistant lines has become over the years the primary site of mourning for their missing relative. Each time Pam Cain visits the memorial, she leaves an object of some sort for her father—“a flag or a yellow rose, something”—an act that, according to American studies professor Kristin Hass, the memorial invites, as people come to it with their recollections and object gifts to grapple with the war’s own “restive memory.”26 Pam also takes pains to find and trace her fingers over the names of other MIAs, in support of friends from the league. She participates in the reading of the names, an event held by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund on certain anniversary dates (e.g., tenth, thirty-fifth, etc.); it spans four days, the last three of which run from 5:00 a.m. to midnight, rain / snow or shine, in the run-up to the official Veteran’s Day ceremony at the memorial. Others light a candle at dusk to place at the base of their missing service member’s panel on National POW / MIA Recognition Day. Still others forge their own traditions, bringing some artifact of home to the Wall to bridge the gap between absence and presence.
Deanna Klenda used to bring wheat. Every year but one since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s dedication, she’d gather a little bundle of grain from her family’s farm outside of Marion, Kansas, and take it to her older brother, Dean, at the Wall. They were four years apart and came from a close-knit family, part of the local Czech community in central Kansas. True to their heritage, all four of them loved to polka dance. When Dean and Deanna came in from their chores, just before dinner, “my mom would put on a polka, and instead of eating right away, we would polka dance around the house.” They’d dance at weddings and to the Lawrence Welk show. “My mom and dad were fantastic polka dancers,” and so Deanna and her brother would sweep past them on the dance floor, teasing them, “ ‘We’re better than you are.’ ” As much as he enjoyed polkas and their life on the farm, Dean Klenda also loved to fly. Having enrolled in the Reserve Officers Training Corps at Kansas State University, upon graduation he joined the air force and went to flight school at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, training on the F-105 Thunderchief, a one-person fighter jet. “You don’t know what a thrill is until you fly below the walls of the Grand Canyon,” he told his little sister. When he came home on break, Deanna recalled, he would fly an aircraft. “He would buzz the farm, and we knew we had to go to McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita. ‘I’m here, come get me.’ Scared the crap out of all the farmers. One of my classmates said, ‘I dove off that tractor because a fighter jet was coming right over me, right at my head.’ ”27
Deanna Klenda’s annual tribute to her brother at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Married less than a year, Major Dean A. Klenda was shot down on a bombing campaign over Sơn La Province in North Vietnam on September 17, 1965—his wife’s birthday. Klenda was one of the war’s earliest MIAs.28 Like Pam Cain and Dwayne Spinler, Deanna Klenda remembers the moment she learned the news of her brother’s being shot down. Though Dean Klenda was designated as missing in action, the flight lead in the four-plane formation had observed what he thought was an ejection seat, but no parachute, and then the Thunderchief slam into the earth. Deanna was in college at the time, and after being notified themselves by the local sheriff, her parents had driven up to Kansas State University to tell her in person; she sensed something was wrong on the phone, but thought perhaps it was about her grandmother. The three of them sat in the car together. “I remember vividly. I sat in between my parents. I put my arms around them. And I felt him there. I could feel my brother.” She promised them, “I’ll take care of you.”
Major Dean Albert Klenda.
With her parents among the early members of the National League of POW / MIA Families, Deanna became actively involved with the group in the early 1980s. She accepted the knowledge of her brother’s death but, along with her mother and father, pushed for the recovery of his remains; she attended regional family update meetings regularly, getting to know other MIA families from all over the country. Each summer when she made her trip to Washington, DC, to attend the league’s annual national meeting, she visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to pay her special tribute. Her brother had always looked forward to that time of year—the harvest with its colors and smells. The wheat harvest marked the start of the harvest season, the bread and butter of their life on the farm. It also brought its “wheat stories,” from sitting in the back of the wheat truck, careful not to spill any of the precious grain, to running down to the creek to cool off before returning to work in the wheat field. And so she thought, “ ‘Why would I take a bouquet of flowers to my brother at the Wall? What would he love more than a handful of wheat?’ So I went out and gathered wheat, a ribbon, and stuck a card with it.” The gift of the family’s livelihood and the grain of their youth became her memorial tradition, just as the Wall became the principal place marking his absence. Even that gesture had its own history. Right before Dean left for flight school, Deanna and her parents threw him a party. She made him a big, beautiful bouquet of weeds—a joke between them but also a reminder of the farm (and its wheat) in Kansas even as his Thunderbird flew over landscapes of places, countries, far removed.
To this day, Deanna prefers to visit the memorial at night. “It’s beautiful. It’s serene. There’s fewer people,” she explained. “I like to be the only one there.” Sometimes she’ll stop at the Lincoln Memorial first, to lean against one of its pillars and take in the view. And then she’ll head to the Wall. On one visit, several years ago, she stepped out of the cab to the sounds of polka music. It was about 10:00 p.m., and she couldn’t believe her ears—nearby were four musicians playing away. “When I looked at the Wall that night, when the music was playing, at the panel, I felt my family there. I could feel them,” much like the day she sat between her parents, wrapped her arms around their shoulders, and comforted them over the news of him missing in action. “There was Mom, Dad, and Dean. What are the odds of a polka? And so I went over to [the musicians] and told them my story and what it meant to me. Playing the polka down there. And I thought they just had to know how much that meant.”
On September 17, 2016, after fifty-one years of absence, Deanna Klenda buried her brother’s remains in the small cemetery of Pilsen, Kansas, bordered on one side by wheat fields.29 “Remains” in this instance meant a small piece of tooth enamel and a crown with restoration. From a forensic scientific perspective, it was an extraordinary case. Klenda’s remains had originally been recovered by a Vietnamese farmer who had taken them to his property five kilometers away from the crash site; he had intended to melt the crown for its gold, but didn’t succeed. Instead, he discarded the tooth in a garbage pit on his property. In 2011, the farmer led a joint US-Vietnamese investigation team to the site where he originally came across the tooth and where he discarded it. Three years later, another US team returned to excavate the garbage pit and discovered both the crown and the tiny enamel fragment.
Siblings Deanna and Dean Klenda with the bouquet of weeds.
Tom Holland, former JPAC scientific director and now director of the Defense POW / MIA Accounting Agency’s Strategic Partnerships program, traveled to Kansas to attend the funeral; over the years, he and Deanna had become good friends. He explained the unusual methodology involved in the identification. “We conducted a series of tests on [the dental remains] including a rather novel technique using different types of isotopes. We were able to map the enamel of the tooth recovered to somebody who spent the first 10 years of [their] life in either Nebraska or Kansas.”30 There was a second striking feature to the identification, a material anomaly that dovetailed the isotopic evidence. Deanna Klenda’s uncle, Dr. Harry Klenda, was a well-established dentist, serving as president of the American Dental Association from 1969 to 1970. In his practice, he had experimented with making his own filling materials, including devising his own formulas for gold alloy fillings. Holland recalled that the “dental gold crown that we recovered from the same area as the tooth fragment—and which was a radiographic match to a gold crown documented in Dean Klenda’s dental record—was a dull gold color (almost brass colored). It may have been the color and the higher melting point that convinced the Vietnamese villager who recovered it that it wasn’t real gold.” When Holland first described the gold crown to Deanna over the phone, he mentioned its dull gold color. She responded immediately, “I know just what it looks like. I have the same filling [material] in my mouth. Our uncle made it.”31 Perhaps more than any other detail, the crown confirmed for her that indeed her brother had been found.
Every year, from the time she started attending the league meetings, when Deanna looked out from the airplane window over the National Mall and its memorials as she headed home, she always felt that she was taking her leave from her brother, who remained there at the Wall. “I was usually sitting there with tears running down my face.” In 2017, the first time she visited the city after her brother’s recovery and identification, she felt something entirely different—relief. “I knew I was going home to him,” back to Kansas, where he’s buried next to their parents and an infant brother who died at childbirth, just a few miles from their farm and surrounded by wheat.
Welcome Home
On the podium with its empty seat honoring the war’s missing in action, Maya Lin concluded her Veterans Day address on November 11, 2017, by saying that “if this memorial has helped to welcome you home, … then I am deeply honored to have played my part in your story.”32 Her remarks capture two of the dominant themes within MIA accounting, particularly surrounding the instances when “fullest possible accounting” has yet to occur: the notion of homecoming, in particular a delayed “welcome home,” and that of stories both told and still playing out, almost a half-century after the end of the war in Southeast Asia. In my conversations with MIA families and veterans, the notion of “home” was regularly invoked—whether as the geographic object of repatriation (home to American soil), or the more metaphorical locus of loss and return (“he’s finally home” or “until he’s home”). The term also arose in discussions of Vietnam veterans’ sense of national belonging, or rather exclusion, on their return from Southeast Asia. For example, in learning about the Wisconsin “hero bike”—the motorcycle left at the Wall in 1995 and dedicated to the state’s thirty-seven MIAs—I reached out to two of the veterans who helped create it, Ken “Polack” Pezewski and Bob “Hogman” Thompson. They prefer to call the sleek, intricately detailed chopper the “memorial bike” or the “MIA bike.” Hogman came up with the idea because of Washington, DC, traffic. Having traveled to the capital for the “Run to The Wall” Memorial Day commemorative gathering, he had become separated from Ken and the other Wisconsin bikers one evening. As he was rumbling through the city, trying to get his bearings, he got to thinking about the various things left at the memorial. And then it came to him: that’s what they should do—build a bike from scratch and ride it to the Wall. As he and Ken recounted how they assembled the parts and organized the design competition and fundraisers, Hogman spoke about the discomfiting sense of alienation he felt when he got back from Vietnam. “Every place I went, I never felt I was home.”33 The bike, in some small measure, grew out of that disorientation; roaming around the streets of DC on his motorcycle, the idea of memorializing those who never came home through the craftsmanship of those who did—and yet never really felt at home—seemed a fitting tribute.
In the absence of state-led forms of remembrance and recognition in the immediate postwar years, historian G. Kurt Piehler explains that Vietnam veterans “created their own belated parades.”34 Similar to MIA families grappling with “ambiguous loss,” they devised their own memorial objects and rituals of remembrance. In recent years, Vietnam veterans have gotten some help; they’ve started to receive more commemorative attention, as local, state, and national efforts to thank them and welcome them home proliferate—or, as the celebrated Anishinaabe writer Jim Northrup once put it, “It’s getting popular to be a Vietnam vet.” In 2009, Wisconsin Public Television staff floated an idea to some local Vietnam veterans, an initiative to document and memorialize the Vietnam War experience: what about a “welcome home” event, with a parade, a chance to gather veterans from all around the state? For the most part, the plan was met with skepticism. Producer Mike Derks recalled, “One guy said, ‘I wouldn’t cross the street to be welcomed home. People had their chance.’ ”35 Eventually they pitched another idea—instead of a parade, the event would take place at the fabled Green Bay Packers stadium, Lambeau Field. Eyes lit up, interest grew, and veteran groups got behind the idea, what eventually became LZ (as in landing zone) Lambeau 2010.36 Those killed in action and missing in action would take center stage, literally: in the middle of the football field, 1,244 empty white chairs marked the number of service members “who did not make it home,” and Rolling Thunder Chapter 3 put on a Missing Man Table ceremony. Many of the veterans from northern Wisconsin, including those from the Red Cliff VFW post, made the trip south to attend, often accompanied by their spouses and children. As one veteran recalled, “As soon as I saw the advertisement on TV, I knew I wanted to go.” When he got there, he was struck by how fellow veterans greeted one another: “Welcome home, brother, welcome home.” After years of silence, that masculine code of mourning that kept stories—and, for some, memories—under tight wraps was finally given room to remember the war out loud and in public.37
Among the various highlights of the three-day event, Wisconsin’s Native American traditions helped guide the belated homecoming rituals. Representatives of eleven tribes, five rows deep, led the color guard for the grand entry ceremony, with five drum groups singing honor songs to the veterans as they passed by. “Before the posting and retreat of the colors, Emcee George Greendeer, Oneida Nation Vietnam veteran, asked veterans to forgive the country that did not treat them well upon their return home and offered a prayer and a moment of silence for the soldiers lost in the Vietnam War.”38 Wearing a black “Marine Veteran” baseball cap and holding an eagle feather, Jim Northrup stepped to the podium to address the stadium later that evening. He introduced himself first in Ojibwe and then in English as being from “the Fond du Lac Reservation, in what is now called Minnesota.”39 That got some laughs and whistles. But what set the crowd roaring with delight was his description of his writing. He warmed up by explaining, “I’m an old Ojibwe warrior. My goal is to be the last surviving Vietnam veteran.” Then a smile, “So far, so good.”40 He continued, “I write about Vietnam in the form of poetry, short stories, and I do it because it’s helped with trauma of combat. I sometimes call it my brain takin’ a shit.”41
But then Northrup grew more serious and recited a poem about his late brother, Rodney Charles Northrup, one of three he would share that evening:
wahbegan
Didja ever hear a sound
smell something
taste something
that brought you back
to Vietnam, instantly?
Didja ever wonder
when it would end?
It ended for my brother.
He died in the war
but didn’t fall down
for fifteen tortured years.
His flashbacks are over,
another casualty whose name
will never be on the Wall.
Some can find peace
only in death.
The sound of his
family crying hurt.
The smell of the flowers
didn’t comfort us.
The bitter taste
in my mouth
still sours me.
How about a memorial
for those who made it
through the war
but still died
before their time?42
Northrup acknowledged the belatedness of the nation’s care for the war’s living—that is, the unexceptional, even absent, care that allowed his brother, who served in the US Army “in country 1968–69,” to return damaged and haunted by the experiences of combat.43 His poem touches on the same concern Mary Defoe expressed in her letter to the Department of Veterans Affairs after her husband Ken’s death in 2013. She explained that it wasn’t until 2007, through a casual conversation with his brother, that Ken learned that he was eligible for PTSD compensation—after struggling with it for forty years. “He and other vets have expressed their belief that the VA is just waiting for them to die.” And yet for her husband, she explained, his identity as a Vietnam veteran was a “huge part of his legacy, and even though he didn’t say this, I know he didn’t want to be forgotten when he died.”44
If being forgotten crystallizes the absence of care on a national level—the failure to rehabilitate the battered bodies and psyches of living veterans or to account for the remains of the missing war dead—the acts, gestures, and gifts of remembrance on more intimate, local scales remind us that veterans and war dead, missing or accounted for, belong just as much to families and communities as they do to the state. In Bootin and Rose’s invitation to “join us to honor and remember” Wotsy Soulier is the tacit acknowledgment that the nation cannot care for his remains as they would wish—he will likely never be returned—and thus they as his family and the Duwayne Soulier Memorial VFW post as their proxy are the intimate guardians of his memory. The photo-topped sheet cake and the plate of food blessed and offered before his mother’s grave—like Deanna’s bundle of wheat at the Wall—welcomed him home in absentia. The family marked the occasion, an end of sorts, for an accounting mission that will never be full and never be complete.