A Borrowing of Misery
Anybody who knows me reasonably well and has been paying attention (or are those the same thing?) knows that for some reason I’ve got a thing for the Vietnam War. (The rest of you are welcome to check out this year’s Fourth of July post from the archives.) So when I got word that the traveling Vietnam memorial wall was in town I made sure to get there. Went last Saturday afternoon to Colerain Park with Ruthie and our friend Bart, not knowing what to expect. What I found was the truth in something I’d heard David Crosby say about the Wall in a concert back around 1986, “There are too damn many names on it.” I mean, you just keep walking and reading and I have no personal connection to one of those names, but they’re names I know—like Michael and Kenneth and Pedro and Robert and Gary—and then you look up to see how much more wall there is and it just goes on and on. Even the way it tapers into the ground at each end makes it look like it never ends.
A lady with a microphone was reading through the names when we got there—working her way through the D’s. Between each name they’d ring a bell. “Carl Edward Dunn” Ding. “Charles Clifford Dunn” Ding. “Creighton Robert Dunn” Ding. “David Hamilton Dunn” Ding. The reading had started at eleven o’clock that morning. “Donald Louis Dunn” Ding. We got there just after four in the afternoon. “Gary Wayne Dunn” Ding.
She was in the D’s.
After five hours.
“Gerald Dunn” Ding. The Wall is so highly polished that you can see yourself in it as you look at the names, but I wasn’t there to see myself. I was there, in part, to see the other visitors—members of generations older than my own, who remember. People who had lost brothers, husbands, sons, friends—people who for me are bridges between my own shallow understanding of loss and names etched in sharp block letters in a long black wall. Some cried, though none wept uncontrollably. Some stood for several moments with their fingertips barely touching a name. One rough looking veteran knelt at one of the eastern panels and gingerly placed a rose at its base. He knelt there a long time with his head down. Praying? Remembering? Trying to forget? I have no idea. He may not even know. An older couple stood silently, hand in hand, neither speaking, remembering a soldier I’d guess from their age might have been a son. No words. Except from the lady with the microphone.
“Michael John Dunn” Ding.
Several people had left personal remembrances. One soldier’s daughter left a laminated bio of her dad whom she had never met. Dead in 1966 at age 19--her dad could’ve been mine. (Ruthie wondered later what our generation might have been like had our parents’ generation been so traumatized and decimated.) Somehow the fact that there are over 50,000 names on the wall wasn’t as moving to me as one girl who never met her father.
And so we walked and we looked and we read and we didn’t say anything, Ruthie and Bart and I. We took our time, but you can only process the names of people you never knew for so long and by the time we got to the end of that interminable wall, I was ready to be finished. So after a brief look at a display dedicated to the history of the wall and to personal mementos left there by visitors we made the walk back to the car. We had been there over an hour. “Alfred Thomas Dwyer” Ding.
She was still in the D’s.
A lady with a microphone was reading through the names when we got there—working her way through the D’s. Between each name they’d ring a bell. “Carl Edward Dunn” Ding. “Charles Clifford Dunn” Ding. “Creighton Robert Dunn” Ding. “David Hamilton Dunn” Ding. The reading had started at eleven o’clock that morning. “Donald Louis Dunn” Ding. We got there just after four in the afternoon. “Gary Wayne Dunn” Ding.
She was in the D’s.
After five hours.
“Gerald Dunn” Ding. The Wall is so highly polished that you can see yourself in it as you look at the names, but I wasn’t there to see myself. I was there, in part, to see the other visitors—members of generations older than my own, who remember. People who had lost brothers, husbands, sons, friends—people who for me are bridges between my own shallow understanding of loss and names etched in sharp block letters in a long black wall. Some cried, though none wept uncontrollably. Some stood for several moments with their fingertips barely touching a name. One rough looking veteran knelt at one of the eastern panels and gingerly placed a rose at its base. He knelt there a long time with his head down. Praying? Remembering? Trying to forget? I have no idea. He may not even know. An older couple stood silently, hand in hand, neither speaking, remembering a soldier I’d guess from their age might have been a son. No words. Except from the lady with the microphone.
“Michael John Dunn” Ding.
Several people had left personal remembrances. One soldier’s daughter left a laminated bio of her dad whom she had never met. Dead in 1966 at age 19--her dad could’ve been mine. (Ruthie wondered later what our generation might have been like had our parents’ generation been so traumatized and decimated.) Somehow the fact that there are over 50,000 names on the wall wasn’t as moving to me as one girl who never met her father.
And so we walked and we looked and we read and we didn’t say anything, Ruthie and Bart and I. We took our time, but you can only process the names of people you never knew for so long and by the time we got to the end of that interminable wall, I was ready to be finished. So after a brief look at a display dedicated to the history of the wall and to personal mementos left there by visitors we made the walk back to the car. We had been there over an hour. “Alfred Thomas Dwyer” Ding.
She was still in the D’s.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home