The Soldiers in the Wall

I visited the Wall today. I had been in Washington DC before, on business travel, without a chance to move outside the meetings. I came this week again on business travel, but succeeded to get out to see the soldiers names on the Wall.

I expected a happy reunion with the history of the soldier unknown. People I admired from what I had read about them. I pressed my step as I approached the monument, happy to fulfill my years-long wish to see the Wall and pay my tribute.

Instead, the black shiny granite slab hit me with its rock-hard strength. I saw the soldiers' faces behind the shiny surface. I could hear them scream and cry. I could hear them call their mothers in the agony of death. A reliving of their suffering there sleeps, in the wall; a nightmare of sweat and blood. A movie of their running in the tangled Vietnam jungles, and the end of the run in a Viet-Cong ambush. Many young faces, covered in mud and blood, with their innocence and purity, their idealism, intact. The brown curls of one, the blonde shine from the head of another, their freckles and their blue eyes, their brown eyes. The pink shade of life vanishing from their bodies, fading into a mortal bluish hue. I could almost feel their last breaths on my shoulders, their warm touch begging for help before they fell. I could feel their confusion, their unjustified feeling of guilt, their desperation in the midst of an unconventional war. Their feeling of loneliness and hopelessness while lying in the dampened soil, awaiting for death to save them from their pain. The desolation of the living ones that never made it back. Army soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, SEALs and the rest, they were all there. It was the film that we never lived or saw, but that explains our privileged peaceful life in liberty.

The slab towered far over my head, and seemed to want to fall over me. It was an oppressive moment, to feel the bloody Wall threaten me with its heavy weight.

And then it started shrinking…getting shorter….And then I saw the soldiers again…and they were smiling. In awe, I frowned. Then one, his live pink recovered, got closer, in his neat uniform, upon which he wore a Purple Heart. He comforted me and said "Just listen".

And then they began to weave an explanation of the Wall…the Wall that was a story, not a stone. They told me they just wanted to show me what they did for me. What they did for everyone that they didn’t even know and those born after they were gone. They pointed at the city, the colorful streets, the cherry blossoms, the people briskly walking, the children playing with the squirrels, giggling and running on the grass so green. The popcorn and the soda, the congressmen discussing issues that the people brought to them. They pointed at a sign that said "Register to Vote". They showed me around the Washington Monument, the red and yellow tulips at the Capitol, the sky so blue, the horizon clear of enemies. They showed me images of far away, to see the fallen Berlin Wall, the new government in Russia, and the prosperity and growing democracy in countries touched by American hands.

One of them said that no war is won if the country that fought it has no liberty. "The Viet Cong lost the war", he said. "America preserved its liberty and the people their rights. America won. We lost our lives", he said, "but that's what God wanted us to do, He told us so".

He said Vietnam was but a battle, though bloody, out of many of continuous war for justice and for peace. "Ironic" he said, "but true." He said that, after death, he learned to look at things from an eternal perspective that he would have never understood in life. He said he spoke for all his "buddies" on the Wall and many others from older wars, and that our happiness and freedom was their goal. He said their mission was accomplished.

The Wall kept getting shorter and shorter. Almost 60,000 names later I had learned more from the soldiers in the Wall more than from any ten books that I ever read. Almost 60,000 names later my terror and despair had been replaced by tears of joy and thankfulness. I stepped on the concrete pathway with the new sense that I owed it to someone long gone. I then realized the worth of every inch of the land. And when I walked away from the Wall, I felt I already missed the 60,000 to which I, and all, owe so much, …and I promised I'd come back now and then to talk.

L.R.V.