I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been busy getting ready for WWDC, and suffering a bit of writers block. To get things flowing again, I’m going to take a moment to tell you a Memorial Day story.
In December of 1987 I went on a school trip to Washington DC. As part of that trip we visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While there we learned all sorts of facts about the angle of reflection, how the memorial came to be, and dozens of other things that are now only a dim recollection.
What I do remember is that as our bus of high school students disembarked, the group I was with came upon a man who reeked of booze, and had on his back the clothes he probably lived in every day. Everyone in the group walked around him and avoided any interaction. But something about him seemed irregular for an average homeless man. I also really had no interest in the memorial. It is a list of 50,000+ people that I have never met.
He looked like he was looking for something, and muttering under his breath about “finding”. I must admit that my thought was that he had lost his shopping cart of belongings. Deciding that interacting with this homeless drunk was going to be a more worthy use of my time than looking at granite, I asked him what he was looking for in the hopes that I could help him find it.
He said he was looking for his friend. So I looked around for a similarly dressed drunk homeless man in the hopes that I could point him on the way. Seeing none nearby, I asked where he had last seen his friend in the hopes that I could point him in the right direction. I can’t recall the words, but with the words he spoke it was made clear that the last time he had seen his friend was in Vietnam.
The I understood. He wasn’t looking for a person. He was looking for a name.
Trying to find a name by reading them one at a time is difficult, although I did try for a minute. I then recalled that a few minutes earlier when listening to facts about the wall, that we were told about a stand on one end that had a alphabetical list of names since the names on the wall are in order of death.
It took a bit of convincing to get my new companion to go to the book, since he knew the name was somewhere on the wall, but at least now I understood what he was trying to find. The index on the pedestal was in the form of a phone book. Unlike the wall it lists the service, the rank, and a few other details also lost to memory.
The details he had were few, he had only a common last name, his rank, and the year he died.
The year was off by one. His friend received a posthumous promotion.
We walked down to the eastern panel listed in the index, and found the name. He broke down in tears, and I went to a nearby kiosk that sold kits for making name impressions. I helped him make an impression of the name, and left him there.
One of my pet peeves is the confusion of Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but I can never forget.
Memorial Day is for the war dead, the names on the wall.
Veterans Day is for those still alive with memories of the dead.
