Going To The Wall

Going To The Wall

By Colorado T. Sky

"Going To The Wall."

It's a familiar expression. It means putting out the ultimate effort for family, friends and comrades, regardless of the consequences, without considering failure as an option. It's the kind of thing that enables a mother to lift a car off her trapped child, that sends firefighters into burning buildings, that sends teenagers crawling across rice paddies through hostile fire, to pull out another teenager who might even be too far gone to help. It means bucking the tide of popular opinion and doing what you know in your heart of hearts is right. It means having faith in your convictions, the strength to support that faith, and the endurance to persevere, no matter what.

It seems strangely fitting that, from all the designs submitted for the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial, the design finally chosen was a Wall.

A dark wall, as dark as the night through which we pursued Charlie.

An entrenched wall, dug in more deeply than we were when Charlie finally found us.

A wall engraved with the names of those who served and sacrificed; those whose last act was Going To The Wall, so that they would be remembered by all who saw themselves reflected as we, who had served with them, remembered them.

A reflecting wall, that we could go to as we had before and see ourselves, and see into ourselves, and see that we had done everything we could for our country, our comrades and ourselves. A Wall in which we could watch ourselves grow old as we read the names of our comrades, friends and relatives who would be forever nineteen, or twenty three, or thirty.

A strong wall, like the strength we had to draw upon then and like the strength we share now.

Regardless of the political maneuverings in Washington and Hanoi where the war was a matter of columns of numbers on stacks of papers, regardless of the growing sentiment against the war in the living rooms of America where the war was something broadcast nightly at six and eleven just like the sports scores, regardless of the rantings and ravings of the uninformed, we went To The Wall.

Regardless of any doubts that we had had in ourselves, whether we would be able to hold up under fire or whether we would just piss our pants and run screaming into the path of a bullet, regardless of anything except our love for and trust in our comrades, we went To The Wall.

Now there is another Wall, a Moving Wall.

The Moving Wall: it seems simple enough. It's a wall, and it moves, but there's a lot more than that in its simple nomenclature. More than merely the power to be moved from site to site, it has the power to move us, to draw us into once again Going To The Wall, to reflect the changes in us, as individuals and as a society, to show us that although we may have greyed on the outside, the principles that we held then are as strong now as they were when we were twenty.

Now escorted around the country by Vietnam Combat Veterans Ltd of San Jose, the original idea was to bring the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial to those who, because of age or infirmity or whatever other reason, couldn't visit it in Washington. Built half-size for ease of transport (and even at that, it's no mean feat), The Wall could now come to those who not go to The Wall.

John Devitt "went to the Wall" when it was dedicated on Veterans' Day '82. I think I saw him there. Later, he and Norris Shears, Gerry Haver, and other Vietnam veteran volunteers would build The Moving Wall. It was originally displayed in Tyler, Texas, in October of 1984, less than two years after the dedication of the Memorial in DC. There are now two "editions" of the Moving Wall now which travel the county from April through November, spending about a week at each site.

Now it's coming here.

From June 18th to the 24th, for the benefit of the citizens of Pattersonville, Mariaville, Duanesburg, Schoharie County, the Capitor District and anybody else who's up for Going To The Wall, in memory of the almost sixty thousand who are remembered upon it, and in tribute to them and their comrades here at Indian Lookout.

This is our opportunity to bring the Wall to all those willing to go to it; those who never went, those who went and came back and those who will never come back.

This isn't the first time I've "gone to the wall."

This isn't even the first time I've gone to this particular wall; it visited Hyannis, Massachusetts, in June of 1990 and I was there, too. As a volunteer, I answered questions and directed visitors, less often to a street and number than to a line and panel.

It was toward the end of an afternoon toward the end of the week when an older woman approached me and the Book of Names on the table before me. Anxious and hesitant, small and frail, she looked up at me cautiously from tired eyes the color of faded denim, as if, like old jeans, the color had been bleached from them by time and wear. She spoke haltingly, almost as if she was disturbing my work instead of being the reason for it. She gave me her son's name and I looked him up, jotting down his location. I usually just pointed, but this little old lady was different. I stepped around the table and offered her my elbow.

"It's over this way." I offered her my arm. She took it and we crossed the green.

"He's my son, you know." Somehow I had known. "He used to keep coming home, but then he'd go right over there again. He loved his flying." Her son had been a four-tour chopper pilot, a 31-year old Chief Warrant Officer who had flown everything from Medevac to visiting dignitaries, before he crashed in the A Shau Valley.

I stopped a few feet away from the panel where her son's name stared back at us across the black reflection.

"This is the one." I said. "Six lines down." She went on ahead. She stood there, talking softly almost as if to herself. I couldn't hear what she had to say, but I have a pretty good idea. She reached out and ran her parchment-pale hand across his name; a mother's final loving touch upon the name of the son she would never touch again. She turned and took my arm again and we walked away.

"My son, he was a big fellow, like you." She said as I walked her back to her car. I opened the door for her. She looked up again with those faded-denim eyes. "I think he would have been a lot like you."

I thought about that for a minute, then I shook my head.

"No," I told her, "I think he would have been the kind of man that I would have admired."

He was the kind who would Go To The Wall.

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