A wall for remembering:

...To my angel daddy...

...no inscription provided a clue to its intent I shuddered, remembering - as I had remembered when I saw the helicopter itself a few days earlier - Michael Herr's account in his book, Dispatches, of sitting beside a soldier in such a helicopter and suddenly noticing, after the chopper took rifle fire from the ground, that the soldier's uniform was stained with blood and his eyes frozen in the blank stare of death Thousands of stories such as these, I thought, are concealed behind the polished granite of the memorial...

...The blackness of the commemorative wall reminds us of the reality of death, of men and women punctured by bullets or shattered by mortar rounds...

...The names served as a reminder of who it was that bore the heaviest burden of death and bereavement...

...Beneath one panel lay a postcard from the nearby...

...They have been forced by their war experience, and by the deeply ambivalent reception they have received on their return, to come to grips with profound moral complexities that most of us have not yet faced...

...Yet it remembers these horrors with a quiet dignity...

...It would be presumptuous of me, I realized, to object to the added sculpture if it will communicate more clearly to the veterans and the bereaved of Vietnam that their sacrifice is remembered and respected...

...THERE ARE many lessons we can learn by reflecting on the experience of Vietnam: that guns and sheer determination can succeed in turning an internal struggle over self-determination and nationalism into a superpower confrontation, and that some wars can be lost in dozens of different ways but cannot be won...

...David A. hoekema, an assistant professor of philosophy at St...

...There is a certain silence in the very design of the memorial...

...Perhaps it is the very awareness of these contradictions, and the sense that nothing in human experience is purely good or purely evil, that has made it so difficult for Vietnam veterans to find a place in American society...

...VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL A wall for remembering DAVID A. HOEKEMA FROM A DISTANCE it is scarcely visible, and the thin black line against the surrounding lawn would not draw one's attention at all were there not a constant stream of people walking slowly past it The shape becomes more distinct as one approaches: two walls of polished black granite form a wide "V," each wall tapering to a point at its outer limit and reaching a height of ten feet at the center The top, not the bottom, of the wall is at ground level, and at the center, where the two walls meet, the surrounding grounds have been graded into a shallow depression...

...It was in 1959 that the first Americans died there, in a day when the name "Vietnam" hardly ever occurred in our newspapers or our conversations Line after line, panel after panel, the names go on, their names incised in the polished stone in the order of their death or disappearance The list jumps from the narrow point of one wall to the point of the other and continues...

...It is not too late to learn even from those whose lives came to an abrupt end in the jungles of Vietnam...

...Indeed, the very profusion of notes, wreaths, and dying flowers suggests the importance of the monument to those whose loved ones did not return from Vietnam Maya Lin's design for the monument, chosen from among fourteen hundred proposals, has provoked controversy ever since its selection...

...To see it we must walk into a shallow depression in the earth, to the depth of a grave...

...In Vietnam as in nearly every war, it was the poor and uneducated who died in the place of the wealthy and educated, and the young who died to defend the policies and privileges of the old I thought of the comment of a friend who had seen the memorial a few days before: it reminded him, he said, that war is an institution by which old men trick teenagers into killing each other...

...As Peter Marin has written in a moving reflection published last fall in the Nation (Nov 27, 1982), we find in many Vietnam veterans "a particular kind of moral seriousness which is unusual in America, one which is deepened and defined by the fact that it has emerged from a direct confrontation not only with the capacity of others for violence and brutality but also with their own culpability, their sense of their own capacity for error and excess ." The practice of war is filled with troubling contradictions- between the ideals of freedom we claim to defend and the greed of war profiteers whose interests we serve, between the unspeakable horrors of napalm and mass executions and the acts of kindness and courage which war calls forth...

...And it is at the center that the long list of names begins Dale R. Buis, Chester N. Ovnard, Maurice W. Flournoy, Alfons W. Bankowsky, Frederick T. Garside...

...For the next world war which daily threatens us all - whether it erupts from direct provocation, escalation of regional wars, or mere mistake - may be over in a matter of hours, and the survivors will not honor but envy the dead...

...But when we turn from the global to the personal level, there is a great deal that we can learn from those who returned alive from Vietnam...

...Olaf College in Minnesota, writes on social issues regularly for The Reformed Journal and The Christian Century...

...But visiting the memorial changed my judgment...

...It is set into the ground in the gardens which lie between the stately columns of the Lincoln Memorial and the aggressive skyward thrust of the Washington Monument...

...The proportion of black men who died in Vietnam wastwice as great as their proportion in the American population...

...Even those who chatter gaily as they approach fall silent for a few minutes before the somber black expanse of the memorial...

...Only a few hundred yards from the Vietnam memorial I sat one afternoon, at the height of the war, and listened with half a million others to impassioned speeches calling for an end to the war...

...IT WOULD BE foolish, were it even possible, to try to prevent visitors from embellishing the memorial with their own remembrances...

...We can only pray that the headlong pursuit of confrontation and military advantage will not plunge the world into a war for whose victims there will be no monuments...

...Finally, once again at the center, we come to the names of the last to die, in 1975: Richard Rivenburgh, Walter Boyd, Andres Garcia, Elwood E. Rumbaugh, and Richard Vande Geer...

...At the other social extreme - if the report of another visitor to the monument is correct - not one graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is among the Vietnam dead...

...The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which sponsored the design competition and raised funds to build the memorial, has responded by commissioning a realistic sculpture and the flagstaff at the apex of the two walls as if they together with a flagpole, near the memorial wall (Early this year an alternate proposal, which would have placed both the sculpture and the flagstaff at the apex of the two walls as if they were part of the original design, was rejected ). When I first read about this plan it seemed an unfortunate compromise with aesthetic Philistinism...

...But these differences seemed irrelevant as we stood there, canceled out not only by the passage of time but by the inescapable fact of 58,000 deaths...

...Perhaps some of the other visitors had sat there too...

...But names like Tommy Lee, Juan, Sammy, and Carlos were far more common...

...Others are grieving, their eyes filling with tears when they find the name of a husband, a father, or a son...

...Their voices speak eloquently in the silence of two black granite walls in Washington walls in Washington...

...or perhaps they had been among the supporters of that desperate defense of American interests and prestige which so deeply divided our nation...

...Certain first and last names, I noted, are Dutch, and I wondered whether they came from the Dutch Calvinist community in which I was raised...

...His book, Rights and Wrongs: A Theory of Coercion and Punishment will be published by Susquehanna University Press later this year...

...The Vietnam memorial speaks in more modest and restrained tones, neither glorifying nor belittling the dead whom it honors...

...Visitors have interrupted the solemn simplicity of the memorial with their gifts and gestures of remembrance...

...A florist's bouquet had been delivered - the soldier's name and "Vietnam Memorial" were the only address on the card - with a message of love from "Mom, Dad, Peter, Dirk, Jana, Grandpa, and Grandma " Beside a package of vending-machine cheese and crackers lay a note in a child's hand...

...Air and Space Museum showing a Sikorsky helicopter widely used in Vietnam...

...On the walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial stand 57,939 names, mute remembrance of the American lives snuffed out in America's longest war Two uniformed Vietnam veterans, among a group of Mid-westerners who have come to Washington for a few days to publicize the plight of the thirteen hundred soldiers still listed as missing in action in Vietnam, walk among the visitors with a thick directory of names and their locations on the memorial...

...The present administration seems bent on forgetting these lessions, deepening its involvement and hardening its ideology in Africa and Central America...

...Some visitors are merely curious about the newest of Washington's hundreds of monuments, dedicated in November, 1982...

...from the center of the Vietnam memorial, the white stone of both can be seen in reflection...

...And the addition, in any case, will not diminish the powerful statement of the simple memorial wall...

...Nearby stand several monuments to the dead of the Second World War, their gilded swords and marble eagles loudly proclaiming the valor of the departed...

...When I visited, in late December, Christmas wreaths lay along the base of the memorial, and flowers were stuck into the tiny gaps between adjacent panels...