James Quay is a Conscientious Objector from the Vietnam War era. He is Executive Director of the California Council for the Humanities.
I first went to the Wall in February 1984 dur ing my first visit to Washington, D.C., in nearly 15 years. I had heard about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, had seen photographs and film of it, and knew what an emotional impact it had on visitors.
As I walked along Constitution Avenue toward the Memorial, I kept looking for the black granite walls made familiar by photo graphs. When I couldn't see them, the land scape before me on the Mall became uncanny. Somewhere ahead of me I began to feel the Memorial as a specter that I would confront abruptly. The lightness of anticipation I had been feeling became weighted with a kind of dread.
Like all too many Americans, I was coming to the Memorial with a name to look for: Glendon Waters, He wasn't my comrade-in-arms, or a friend, or a relative. In fact, we had never met. Glendon Waters had been dead over two Years when, on a cold November night in 1969, 1 carried his name on a placard around my neck in the "March against Death".
In that march, 45,000 people, each with the name of an American killed in action in Viet nam and a lighted candle, walked across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, past the west side of the Lincoln Memorial to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There each marcher paused before the main entrance of the White House, stepped on a short wooden stand, and, one by one, said the name he or she carried, loudly or softly as they chose. lt took nearly 40 hours to say all the names.
In November 1982 the names were spoken again in the Candlelight Vigil of Names that preceded the dedication of the Vietnam Vet erans Memorial. This time the names weren't being shouted at the White House but were being intoned quietly in the National Cathedral. And this time it wasn't the war's opponents who spoke the names, but the war's veterans. Yet the spirit was the same. As we had once shouted the names, to demonstrate that the war's individual costs were not to be for gotten, now the war's veterans were intoning the names, for the very same reason.
Suddenly, I turned a corner and there they were. There they were, all the names. They started at ground level and rose slowly as I walked down the path, rose until I felt I was descending into an open grave. At the center I stopped, in the midst of the names that now towered over me, closed my eyes, bowed my head, and just stood there, utterly over whelmed. There are so very many names.
The names receded only when I walked up the path to the directory. Glendon Lee Waters: panel 23 East, line 33. Back down into the Memorial, I found the name of the man who had been killed just as I had publicly begun to oppose the war. What would we have said to one another if we'd met then in July of 1967? Or now? What wouid we say to one another now?
The Memorial makes meetings possible between the living and the dead. Some of these meetings are depicted in this book. Here, chil dren meet fathers they never knew. Parents meet sons. Lovers are reunited. Comrades. Glendon Waters and me.
The names of the dead wait here for the living to come close and touch them. But as the Wall gives them to us, it also takes them away again, for touching the names only makes us feel how far away they are. They must remain there, united by their shared catastrophe, while we, the living, must leave, united by our shared grief.
lt was this grief that made me climb the steps of another Memorial to gaze at the somber face of Abraham Lincoln. That face had known grief, and I felt that Lincoln, of all Americans living or dead, would understand what I was feeling. He too looks upon the Wall. Only when I read again the words he had used to heal a divided nation "With malice toward none, with charity for all" did I feel my pilgrimage was complete.
I am profoundly grateful to the dedicated men and women who built the Memorial, for they have given all who were hurt by the Viet narn War the shrine we need if we are ever to be healed. Like the war it recalls, the Memorial has been denounced and defended. But, like this book, it brings together the conscien tious objector and the general, the protestor and the warrior. Important differences between us may remain, but the Memorial has given us something still more important the common ground of grief. So long as such grief is heart felt, shared, and remembered always there is hope for peace, and so for us all.
The generations wounded by the war will come to the Wall, bringing our scars and our memories with us, looking for healing. But to truly heal ourselves, we must ensure that when future generations look upon the Memorial, they will not have lost what we have lost to feel the absolute, silent sorrow embodied by the black walls, the American names that are on them, and the Vietnamese names that are not.
Return To Reflections on the Wall Contents Page