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Jack Mallory
Thanks to you all for your reflections on my writing--especially your deeply felt recollections, Jane.
I wrote this in about 1995, after visiting D.C. for a conference. Dedicated to you, Jane. You're on the Big Wall.
A Night Visit to The Wall
It was night, and most of the ice on the Washington sidewalks had melted by the time I walked from my hotel down to The Wall. This was my second trip in as many days: a day earlier Carolyn and I had visited the memorial, set starkly against the brilliant snow. The black granite of The Wall had absorbed the sun's heat, and the names had been warm to the touch. It was now as dark as it had been bright the day before.
I'd been to The Wall perhaps a dozen times: from the ground breaking to the dedication, and numerous times after. But I’d never gone alone, and never at night. Now, I wanted to be there by myself, without crowds. Time to think my own thoughts, and not answer someone else's questions; time to be alone with The Wall, to make it mine, and not share it with the tourists.
I crossed Constitution Avenue near the State Department and headed down towards the Mall. As I passed a side street, a Vietnam Veterans Memorial sign suddenly flared a deep arterial red. Shook me up, and it took a minute to figure out the red was a reflection of the stop light on the green of the Park Service sign. I wondered if this visit was a good idea. I zipped my jacket to my throat, colder than the temperature warranted.
Like I said, The Wall and I are old acquaintances. But it's been a sort of distant friendship; we've never spent any time alone together. This time I wanted to get a little closer. There were parts of the Wall I wanted to spend some time with.
The closest I can get to the dead I knew is by visiting those panels. The panels that encompass my tour of duty, and those 11th Armored Cavalry troopers who died between May of 1969 and May of 1970. I didn't know most of them, but I remember some of them well: especially Don Holman, the young lieutenant finishing his tour as a tank platoon leader, and Stuart Lamkin, the lieutenant I sent out one morning to replace him. They were ambushed north of Tay Ninh a few hours later, riding the same tank. An RPG round killed both of them. First day in the field for Stuart, last day for Don. I had to write their folks.
The little girl's panel is different. Her name's not on it, not on this Wall; she was Vietnamese. But sometimes I think of our Wall as the little Wall; there's a bigger Wall, much, much bigger, in my head. It's got all the American names, and the Vietnamese names, and Cambodian, and Laotian, and Korean, and Australian names. All the names. Soldiers and civilians. Not just the dead, but their parents, and brothers and sisters and husbands and wives and children and friends. All the dead, and all those who loved them, and whose lives were shattered by the war. It's a big Wall.
So, I visited my panels, alone in the dark. I touched every one of them. They were cold, now. It was dark, and the lighting was dim; I couldn't see myself in the Wall, like you can during the day. I crouched and read names from the lowest lines, and peered to read the highest lines I could. These are the names most people never see, never read. I wanted to read these little-read names, the names of those in the margins of history.
Then, still alone, I walked the length of the Wall, reading a name from every panel. Doing this myself, alone, made the Wall mine for a little while. No wife, no friends, no other vets, no tourists. Just me, and the names on this Wall, and the names, all the names, on the big Wall in my head.
A quiet foursome walked down the path toward me, and my time alone was over. So I left the Wall and walked over to the Women's Memorial. I had seen it the day before for the first time, but access to it had been blocked off because of the sheet of ice all around. That night I circled it, to see the side I had been unable to see earlier. The image of the nurse kneeling over the wounded soldier's helmet symbolized all the anguish of nurses' accounts of their war.
Then I walked over to the statue of the three infantrymen. I had resented its addition to the Memorial, already perfect in its simple eloquence, and never paid much attention to “The Three Dudes” as some vets refer to it. But that night, still alone, I spent time there. My initial interest was accuracy: did the sculptor get them "right?" My eyes wandered over uniforms and gear: yup, they look grungy enough; flak jacket, boonie hat, funky fatigues.
My eye and my memory were hooked by the M-16 of the trooper on the right. My hand still knows the weight, the feel of the plastic and steel. I remembered the old omnipresence of the weapon--as much a part of my daily wear as a wallet, for that long year. I stepped over the chain and grabbed the forestock in my left hand, cradled the butt under my arm, grabbed the pistol grip in my right hand. It still felt strangely, "right." It still "fit" me, nearly 25 years later. Glad I'll never have to carry one again, but glad also, somehow, that I once carried it, and that my memory carries it still.
My self-consciousness finally intruded, reminding me that I looked a fool standing there grasping a statue's rifle. I slipped back over the chain, and headed toward my hotel. But before I left I walked to the center of that broad V and simply said, “Bye, guys." And saluted, and turned, and walked away.
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My writing workshop was full of young(er than me) men and women who have served in our endless wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; I meet with half a dozen others weekly in a VA therapy group. I hope my writing suggests ways for them to deal with their own little girls, whatever form they may take. Nearly 20 years, now, of ongoing war, much of it as unclearly--or dishonestly--justified as the Vietnam War. More American deaths, more little girls. Another Big Wall.
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) I think of all those 19th century songs featuring "home", and then Carl Sagan's "pale blue dot", "the only home we've ever known". The heartfelt appeal is pretty damn universal. I dunno about the dispersing and "recombining" part in the appeal -- yet, but that is a recurring theme throughout cosmology, (where the bringing together and recombing is due to gravity), and biology (where the bringing together and recombining is due to the self-organizing principles of life itself). Dispersion is the natural result of the second law of thermodynamics -- that entropy increases. So many higher animal life forms , fish, birds, whales, seals, even some butterflies, that can roam far and wide try mightily to return to their places of birth to mate and reproduce. Evolution has clearly played a strong hand in making this happen, and had to wire up the nervous systems of all those various creatures to do so. I'll bet our human nervous systems have a lot of that wiring built in. Music strikes resonances in our neurology -- that is what the musician/composer is trying to do, without a first-principles theory but with a lot of rules-of-thumb. 
