”I`ll tell you one thing, my enemy would
respect me more than my own country,
and what is this, are we all pardoned
now? That`s what I would have put here,
a big pardon for the Vietnam veteran.
Something that says, `Sorry, boys.` ”
–Jeffrey Budzis, former marine
The wall is an intensely public place. There you will hear kids callously joking about finding their own names carved into the panels and, a few feet away, a veteran or a father weeping inconsolably; you will hear a tourist asking whether the bodies are buried here, too. You may see a veteran lay down a medal and a youth pick it up and pocket it a few minutes later. You will hear the stories of death, of valor, of bragging–and of mental collapse and madness. You will find a stream of humanity, most indifferent, some merely curious, a few transfixed by memory and emotion.”
So wrote Duncan Spencer about what he and photographer Lloyd Wolf witnessed while recording the accompanying thoughts and images of people visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. On this Memorial Day, honoring American servicemen who died in all wars, we excerpt these vignettes from Spencer and Wolf`s portrayal of the continuing healing that takes place daily at this stark monument to those who died in our country`s most divisive modern conflict.
ROBERT M. STATON JR. AND FAMILY
My brother died in Vietnam. He was missing in action in `67. The wall has come to mean a great deal to Vietnam veterans, it`s some kind of a reward for the job they did.
So I wanted to come to the wall for my mother–you know she still goes through a lot of changes. Because my brother, he never came home, his body didn`t, we never did see it.
So I wanted to come by and rub the name. He was the older brother, born in `47. What he did, when he got out of high school, he was trying–you see I come from a family of ten–trying to go to school and my father couldn`t afford to send him to school.
He got fed up one day and he volunteered for the military–airborne, he wanted to be a paratrooper. At the time he died he was with the 173d Airborne. It wasn`t until 1968, they showed up one day, two people, my father wasn`t home at the time. Two people they sent out to tell the family.
I was the first person to see them, and I went over to them and asked what they wanted.
They waited until he came home and told us what had happened.
We had already been told that his body was on a ship, and the body was supposed to come back to Rocky Mount, N.C.
We were willing to accept the fact that he had died over there and his body was on the way home. We had already hired an undertaker and called the funeral home.
Then we waited. `Cause when the body gets there, they are supposed to call the undertaker to go pick it up. But they never called the undertaker.
He never got a call at all. It went on for a couple of months. We kept expecting it.
We had to call Ft. Bragg. We had to call them up.
After we had called, they came back, you know, and they finally admitted that they didn`t know where he was–that took three months.
And then they wanted to send us a casket with bricks in it, but my sister, who was the oldest at the time, said no. She made this decision. She`d rather have nothing.
LEE CORN
Corn is a sun-blasted carpenter from Stendahl, Ind., with tiny scars all over his hands. He wanted a career in the military–he still wants a career in the military–but what he found there disillusioned him. He spent his year doing paperwork, sometimes near where battles raged; he felt his talents were wasted, and his work was wasted. Now, so long after the war, he`s still working day to day.
I remember my return to the U.S. I remember I just wanted to come home and I just wanted to hear someone say we`re proud of you. Now, you know, your family doesn`t count in this. They are always going to say something like that. But it never happened. I remember one guy and I sitting in a bar just after I got back, and believe me there were spaces all around us in that bar because we were both in uniform. The bartender brought us a beer, and he says, ”There`s a businessman and he says, `I don`t care what everyone says, I think you guys did a hell of a job.` ”
We didn`t know it, but that was the first and the last time for both of us.
JASON DALY
I`m pretty sure my father was in Vietnam–or some . . . yeah, I`m pretty sure it was Vietnam. He`s 44.
Yesterday, we went up to Arlington, and seeing a wreath-laying ceremony was really touching. I cried because it was such a feeling inside. Why they had to . . . I don`t know, but seeing all the graves and, it`s sad but it`s . . . Vietnam is not deep history, it`s pretty present, but I`ve never really talked about it. We don`t study it in school, and I wish we would more, though.
It would be nice to have something here like they have up at the Tomb (of the Unknowns). Not glorious, but more honorable. Like maybe a guard or something, that would be nice because I was really impressed with that. And being out there (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial), it`s nice, but it needs more honor, I think. Because these are men who died for their country.
No, I can`t even say that; I mean, they died for somebody else.
ROBERT MULLER
Muller is the president of the Vietnam Veterans of America, the largest single organization for vets of that war. Born of Swiss parents, he shared many immigrants` reverence for an adopted country. Both scholar and athlete in school and college, he fit the mold of the all-American boy, even to his enlistment in the Marine Corps, where he so excelled that he was at the top of his class. He gladly went off to war as a second lieutenant in September 1968 with the Third Marine Divison. Next April 29 his unit was assigned to take an obscure hill, and that changed his whole life.
They told us line officers we were running 85 percent casualties. We talked a lot about it. Being the athlete I was I remember with such conviction saying that if I lost a leg in Vietnam I would ask the nearest man to put a bullet to my head. To keep things calm at home, I told everyone that I was a supply officer. I guess I got shot because I was reckless. I was with ten tanks, eight guns, and two flamethrowers and we had run into this hill with a suicide squad of North Vietnamese Army soldiers. My group was ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers. They just would not sustain an attack on the enemy. Every time we got into combat, all three of our ARVN units tried to run.
So we called for four jet strikes to drop their whole payload on this little hill–plus a half hour heavy bombardment. Eight gun tanks blasted it with high explosive and flechette rounds.
There was a colonel in a helicopter on my case. ”Take the goddamn hill.” With three tanks, I got behind the lead tank and as we were walking up a guy comes out of a hole, and I dinged him–as best as I can figure it out, it was his partner who dinged me. It was one shot. It went through both lungs and exited, severing the spinal cord.
An Australian dragged me off the hill. With my luck, the hospital ship Repose was right off the coast near Quangtri, and I was told if I had arrived one minute later, I would have been dead.
After I was shot, I was conscious for 30 or 45 seconds, long enough to know I was hit. My first thought was my girl–”She`s going to kill me! Number two, I`m not going to worry about that because I`m going to die here on this stinking hill.”
I can only describe it as being in the middle of a kaleidoscope–that must have been the spinal–and after that no feeling of pain but a mellow and relaxed feeling. I was looking up at the sky and getting a very warm, mellow sensation, it was like a balloon deflating. I felt life ebbing away. You can`t grab it and you can`t stop it. That`s it.
On the ship I couldn`t believe I was alive. People say there are those who grieve over their loss. I was just stunned that I was alive. I was euphoric. The thought never entered my mind that I was not going to make it. They told me right there the likelihood that I was going to be paralyzed. I told them that`s okay, I was so happy to be alive and for my entire life from that moment I have never looked at myself for what I have lost but for what I have got. Life is all a gift.
LARRY NEIL WHITE.
White is 33 and round like a baby, though his eyes are too quick, never resting, and the wrinkles around them are deeper than they should be. Altogether his compact figure is a portrait of unease, like a powerful little bear in chains. He came to the wall from Owensboro, Ky., in the western part of the state, the dark tobacco country, where he now lives.
One time I had a flashback. It was at a banquet and I had drunk some. I heard copters, gunfire. I grabbed my wife and pushed her face into a brick wall; blacked both her eyes and gave her a concussion. I was so sorry when I`d found out what I had done. I checked into a VA hospital and from the time I started to when I ended I spent 167 days in that hospital.
After I did that to Jo-Ann I had to give up my drink. I had my last drink October 1, 1983, with a bottle of Jack Daniels, and I laid that bottle down and I said never again.
I think I`ve spent ten years in a trancelike state, and I`m doing something productive. My wife drives a new car, it seems like a miracle finally happening.
I got a lawyer on my case and I finally got my 100 percent disability this February. That`s $2,000 each month. I knew I had this post-traumatic stress syndrome. What does it mean? Over the years I held 39 jobs in ten years –dishwasher, working on a riverboat, truck driver, even the exterminating business. I`ve been in jail 27 times and married five times. I`ve made threats on persons, and I`ve assaulted a police officer.
Since I`ve been involved with (Vietnam) vets, there`s been a newspaper story about me in Owensboro. I was getting a lot of satisfaction out of it. I bought a van and started giving disabled vets rides to the hospital and other places, and within three months, with the help of this VFW post, I got two cars and two vans and 11 guys helping me, and I spent about $6,000 out of my own pocket. Jo-Ann says, ”Hey, sucker, slow down.”
So that`s how I got to the monument. I knew I was going to bring that Kentucky State flag up here if I had to do it myself.
To me, it means America. To see all those names, all those dead boys, or kids. I was only 19 when I went over there. I got here the firt time, I just sat down and I cried, and we cried and we held each other. Them old beer-bellied dudes, I`m proud of them.
All those dead boys; I feel that by seeing their names in granite I can lay (to rest) some of these ghosts.
