Memorial Lets Living Reach Out Visitors To Vietnam Wall Leave Notes, Gifts, Which Are Cataloged For Exhibit
They come every day, years, even decades after their loved ones were lost.
They leave the kinds of things that people have been leaving ever since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall was built - poems, letters, medals, black lace panties, teddy bears, cans of sardines, six packs of beer, toilet paper, wedding rings.
At night, park ranger Pete Prentner walks along the wall with his flashlight, picking up the tangible pieces of lives broken by grief. In the 15 years since the wall was dedicated, nearly 54,000 items have been left.
“No one ever expected this to happen,” he said. “It’s so personal. It caught everyone by surprise.”
It now takes almost an hour a night to collect everything left at the wall and longer on holidays such as Memorial Day.
Through the years, people have left dollar bills, rosaries, locks of hair, an empty bottle of champagne and two goblets, a golf trophy with this note, “It’s a beautiful day. We’d be playing golf. I’d be beating you by two strokes, sucker.”
Many remembrances are for people unknown but loved anyway. There are the sonogram images for Sgt. Eddie E. Chervony, with a letter that says “Happy Father’s Day, Dad! Here are the first two images of your first grandchild. … Dad, this child will know you, just how I have grown to know and love you even though the last time I saw you I was only 4 months old. Your daughter, Jeanette.”
The National Park Service collects, catalogs and stores the items in a climate-controlled warehouse in Maryland.
A few things are exhibited at the Smithsonian Institution and four other museums. Next month, the story of the mementos left at the wall will be told on a Web site. The collectors plan to take some items to schools around the country to teach another generation about a war most know little about.
This collection is different from all others, which typically reflect a curator’s conscious selections. In this case, the public is the curator.
“It is the public saying this is important,” said Duery Felton Jr., the Park Service curator and himself a Vietnam vet. “Only the donor and maybe the recipient understand the meaning of the items.”
Even though Washington is a town full of imposing monuments, no other has provoked such an emotional torrent of tokens and trinkets as the wall, which draws some 3 million visitors a year.
The first artifact actually arrived when the wall’s foundation was being poured. A man wanted to leave, in the concrete, a Purple Heart awarded posthumously to his brother.
For the first two years, the items were gathered nightly by maintenance people and stored in cardboard boxes in sheds. When the flood didn’t stop, they realized they had quite a phenomenon on their hands.
Each item collected gets a bar code, is placed in a plastic Zip-Loc bag and is carted to the warehouse, known as the Museum Resource Center. There, items are handled by technicians with white cotton gloves.
Some items have shocked the rangers, such as cremated ashes dumped on the concrete. “The first time, we didn’t know what to do,” ranger Prentner recalled. “We called the police. We wondered: Is this like disposing of a body? Luckily, it rained that night, and that’s probably what the guy wanted.”
There was the flesh-tone double-leg prosthesis, complete with running shoes and black socks, that belonged to Stephen E. Belville. He was wounded in 1968 and died in 1994.
There was the cardboard covered with cigars and this message for Francis Eugene Sanders: “For 28 Christmas mornings, I’ve thought of you and our last cigar together. Now for your birthday, it’s time for you to catch up to me.” It was from his buddy, Sgt. J. Kornsey.
The item that haunted all who saw it: a wrinkled photo of a young North Vietnamese soldier and a little girl with braided pigtails. The accompanying letter said:
“Dear Sir, For 22 years, I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only 18 years old that day we faced one another on that trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you didn’t take my life I’ll never know. You stared at me for so long, armed with your AK-47, and yet you did not fire. Forgive me for taking your life. I was reacting just the way I was trained, to kill V.C. … So many times over the years, I have stared at your picture and your daughter, I suspect. Each time my heart and guts would burn with the pain of guilt.”
At times, it is hard for the rangers and the museum workers to even look at the mementos. “You learn to read, but not read,” said Felton.
In the darkness, with tourists still milling around the wall, Prentner stumbled upon a letter addressed to Fred: “I always looked up to you without you even really knowing it. Man, you looked so good in your uniform, jump wings, spit-shined boots … Love, Frank.”
The 35-year-old ranger, who served four years in the Army himself, cannot help being moved.
“I try to distance myself,” he said. “Some of these guys disappeared more than 25 years ago, but it is obviously still so emotional. Each one had a name. Each one had a family and friends.
“You never know all the people and what they could have been.”