Remembrance of things lost

 Memorial Day weekend, and out on O'Day Road the sun is shining and the sky is blue and it's '68 again, '69, '70. Joe Walsh is singing about the glories of Rocky Mountain Way. A Huey evac chopper is beating at the air as it settles in to land, side doors open, men and women peering out.

A few feet away, men hold tight to their bush hats against the prop wash, transported God knows where in their memories. 

They are old now, these men. They are gray-haired and white-haired and the beards they sport, some of them, give them the look of haunted Santas. Because this is all just a setpiece, out here on O'Day Road. That's a cover band rocking through Joe Walsh, and the Huey is a restored 1970 model taking the old vets and their wives on peaceful rides, and it's not really '68 or '69 or '70, not at all.

Memorial Day weekend, and they are dedicating the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. And they have brought the traveling version of the Wall to commemorate, panels and panels of names stretching away, beginning ankle high and growing until the names stretch far above your head.

The names are Thomas C. Treadway and Harlin P. Treen and Vicente D. Perez. 

They are Sam Tenorio and Wilson N. Flowers and Edward O. Bilsie

They are Jimmie D. Brown and Lanny M. Hamby and Marcas J. Garcia and Vincent Saldano, all of whom died between 23 Sep 1968 and 28 Oct 1969, along with Valentine B. Suarez and David L. Sackett and dozens and dozens more.

Every one of them on this stretching-forever wall had families, and some of them had wives and some of them had children. None of them came home to them from Vietnam. Names and names and names, all of them lost in some benighted place halfway around the world, all of them remembered now on this weekend.

Memorial Day is not a happy day, nor is it supposed to be. It is not about thanking some uniform for his or her service. It is about all of those who did that service, and who didn't survive it.

It is about the dead -- the truest heroes of this filthybusiness of human beings killing other human beings, most of whom didn't ask for any of it.

It is about the men in bush hats and caps porcupined with unit pins, shuffling slowly along the panels and bending close occasionally, searching for their lost brothers.

"Find who you were looking for?" I ask one of the bush hats, whom I'd noticed peering intently at one of the panels.

"Yep," he says.

And then: "Well, four of 'em. There's 12 on there somewhere."

Twelve brothers. Twelve men -- kids, really, most of them -- he laughed and lived and ate and likely got drunk with.

Twelve who didn't make it back.

He did, and so he's here. Because it's his job to remember them, on this weekend and all weekends.

And now here comes the Huey again, beating the air. The cover band screeches away. American flags flutter in the cool breeze, and the old men search, and the panels stretch on and on, names and names and names again, sacrifice in every one.