Vietnam Wall Experience

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© St. Petersburg Times
published October 18, 2002

The traveling Vietnam Wall Experience is a three-quarter scale replica of Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It will be in New Port Richey and open to the public beginning this morning at 9. A closing ceremony will take place at 6 p.m. Sunday. To reach the Wall, take U.S. 19 to Trouble Creek Road. Go east to Madison Street. The names of the 58,175 men and women who died or are missing in Vietnam are re-created on the memorial as they appear on the Wall in Washington, D.C. The faux-granite replica is 240 feet long and 8 feet high. After New Port Richey, the traveling wall will go to Bradenton, Palm Beach and Jacksonville.

'I had not thought death had undone so many'

I served as a U.S. Marine in Vietnam in 1965-66, and wrote the following column after visiting the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C., in 1987. By explanation, the character "Wife" referred to in the column was based on my late wife, Lee, who died in 1997. I have since remarried. Everything else, including the emotions of the day, remains the same -- Jan Glidewell.

For nearly 20 years, I had dealt with my memories of the Vietnam War as others deal with the knowledge of their own impending death -- denial.

I knew I didn't have the strength to deal with the pain of the past and the challenge of the present. So I just pretended that none of those things happened, or that if they did, they were real only in the abstract. Real like a first bright red tricycle is real, as the sight of my firstborn son is real, real in the chemical bridges across the interstices of my brain cells.

As I hit Washington, D.C., that recent summer morning, I had no particular intention of visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I managed a pretended indifference -- fooling everyone but Wife, who knows the signals that show I am covering fear with indifference.

But in the back of my mind, a gnawing insistence began, a moral imperative, a debt owed by the living to the dead.

The only way I can put it into words is to say that I knew "The Wall" was supposed to list the names of all of the war dead, and I had two friends from the war with whose deaths I was all too familiar.

We had shared, if nothing else, a cynical distrust of the massive bureaucracies that are a necessary part of the running of a military force. And, as I sat on the terrace roof of a Washington hotel sipping a glass of wine, I became convinced that the final irony of having their names go unrecorded -- after having already been deprived of 50 or 60 years of life, marriages, children, successes, pleasures -- would be just too much to bear.

I knew that if I didn't visit the wall and "proofread" it for those names, I would always wonder, and the wall would always be in front of me and never behind me. I like to think I came back alive for other reasons -- but this responsibility remained undeniable.

My wife and friends still kid me about the roundabout chase I led them on, walking clear around the reflecting pool between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

But when we walked into the shadow of the Vietnam Memorial, the kidding stopped.

Other than being on the scene of a death or outrage -- a fairly common occurrence in my job -- I have never seen or felt so much concentrated emotion as I did that August day. Men my age . . . men my girth . . . some dressed in business suits and some in ragged jungle fatigues, leaned against the wall and sobbed openly. Total strangers embraced.

The stiffest of lips and the driest of eyes lose their usefulness when you see a wedding invitation tucked into a crack of the wall with "Daddy, wish you could have been to my wedding" penned neatly across the front.

As I walked down the sidewalk to the center of the "V" of the monument, the granite plaques listing the names of the dead got longer, and T.S. Eliot's words kept running through my mind: ". . . so many, I had not thought death had undone so many."

I found the names I sought, and some other familiar names of men who were still alive when I had left them.

I was struck by the joy that comes with being a reader -- rather than one who is read -- of the wall. And I was struck by the knowledge that I was only hours away from a cold shower and a gourmet meal with loved ones, and by the guilt all of that brings with it.

I wondered how long the wall would be for a similar monument for World War II or World War I, or Korea. Would there be enough granite?

Will anyone be around to build any kind of wall after World War III?

I have a better understanding now of the debt of gratitude we owe all of those who have ever served, are serving and ever will.

And I have a better understanding of the depth of emotion that can be engendered by symbols of past conflicts and absent friends.

A much better understanding.

Ask the guy who sold me an MIA-POW bumper sticker as I left the memorial.

"Bittersweet experience, isn't it?" he said.

I think I croaked, "Yeah."

Or something that sounded almost like that.

-- Jan Glidewell is a columnist in North Suncoast editions of the Times.

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