The path leads around to the end of the wall, where the first this I saw was a family gathered looking somebody up in the directory.

As you walk from one end of the wall to the other it starts out as a low marble wall. It's covered with neat columns of names. At the end there is only one row of names, but as you walk on it quickly turns into a wall that is much taller than I, with more rows of names than I can count. There is a solemn tone to the place.

    

I feel like that guy crouched with family around was rubbing the name of an old friend that didn't make it back. He looked like the kind of guy that would have gone to serve just because his family has a tradition of service to the USA. Probably did a good job to.

     

I followed the path around from the end of the wall. There was a statue of three guys and a guy that was obviously a tour guide explaining the history to people. He said that the original wall had sparked a lot of controversy when it was built. Some felt that it didn't honor the guys that made it back at all, so the statue of the three men, one each from the big three ethnic groups here (brown, white, and black) was added. Then somebody else complained that there was no honor given to the women that served and died there. Since most of them were nurses they added the caregiver statue.

Then he explained that what is really unique about this memorial is how it attracts stuff. Every day the Park Service finds stuff left by the wall. Sometimes it's military medals or old love letters. One time somebody left a brand new Harley Davidson motorcycle with license plate HERO. They found out later that part of the rolling thunder march was a group that guarantees rides home for any member that needs it. Their leader had told the Park Service that was "in case any of those names needed it." No they didn't want it back. A veterans group is raising money to build a museum to show some of that stuff to the public.

     

That tour left the area. I wandered some more and found this Park Service Ranger starting another tour of the wall. He explained that the names were in chronological order, but rather than start on the left and go to the right the list starts in the middle and goes up to the end and then continues from the other end back to the middle again. Since only known dead are listed there, occasionally they have to add another name as one of the unknown soldier's remains are identified. You can tell such names because for a while they look whiter than the rest. They put them in as space allows as close to the right place as possible.

The Viet Nam war didn't start neatly with a declaration the way some do. It was a miasma of conflicting ideas about what was going on. At first it was just trainers going over to offer the French help with training the Vietnamese. The first of those to die were in 1959, so the wall started counting there. Then the situation escalated steadily for more than a decade.

The open warfare was clearly ended in 1975 with the evacuation of Saigon, which many people remember seeing footage of on the nightly news. However since then agent orange and the land mines we left there have continued to kill people. He told us about another memorial to those victims, but I never got a chance to visit that.