Remembering My Friends on The Wall
This is an oped I wrote and published on Memorial Day years ago in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which is no longer in existence.
Looking through the grove of trees between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument that crisp autumn morning in 1983, I shivered. There it was. Two long tapering slabs pushed into the earth at their obtuse intersection, gleaming in the sunlight, black and fearful, with 57,939 souls lurking within.
The Wall.
Standing at the center, I could see wreaths, medals, vases of flowers and American flags placed in front of the panels that stretched away from me in either direction. Nearby, someone had wedged a pink rose between two of the panels.
But it was the names I came to see. There were 14 to look for, 14 friends who had been killed in Vietnam. Most of them had been in my helicopter company.
On panel 38W there is James G. Brady, a door gunner blown apart by a rocket-propelled grenade. And on the same panel, because they died that same November day in 1968, incinerated in the white-hot magnesium inferno of a wrecked helicopter full of 100-pound parachute flares are Jerome D. Chandler, David D. Creel, Allen E. Duneman, Frederick H. Frazer and August K. Ritzau.
Two more panels down on 36W are Stephen C. Ponty and Gerald D. Markland, who were shot down and killed while laying a smokescreen around the edge of a hot landing zone.
And on 34W I find John N. Cottrell. We went through two years of college together and two months of basic training in the same platoon. Halfway through my Vietnam tour I discovered his name on a killed-in-action list in Stars and Stripes. It was years before I found out that he died when a helicopter gunship missed its target by 50 meters and hit Johnny’s squad instead.
Ricardo I. Romero and Michael G. Porter are on 27W. They were killed by a rocket that hit their hootch. Romero was standing in the doorway talking to his best friend and died instantly. His friend wasn’t hurt, at least not physically. Porter died in a field hospital the next day, just before the Red Cross straightened out a mixup that had kept his family’s letters from reaching him.
Clyde S. Evans, a crew chief who loved leaning out the door of his Huey gunship with one foot on the skid is on panel 24W. He died in the crash that occurred when the tail rotor of his ship was shot away.
Donald L. Kilpatrick, a helicopter pilot and platoon leader whose name is on panel 18W was hit in the head by a 51-caliber bullet and died in the hospital. Coincidentally, on his first combat flight in our company, Kilpatrick’s aircraft commander was shot in the head and Kilpatrick flew the man, who survived, to a hospital.
The last name on panel 6W is that of Richard W. Salmond, who lived next door to me in a college dormitory for two years. He was not in my company but went to Vietnam as a captain after I’d come home. After getting his men out of a helicopter that had crashed, he was struck in the head and killed by the rotor.
They had been dead 14 to 15 years then, but it wasn’t until I stood in front of the polished black granite staring at the evenly etched names that it finally sank in, and I cried.
I had visited the Vietnam Memorial that day to do a story for a newspaper’s Sunday magazine. For that story, I tracked down as many of my friends’ families as I could.
Some mothers and fathers were still wracked by grief, at least one divorce seemed to have been triggered by the death of a son and there were several children who knew their fathers only from pictures.
The pain in many cases did not seem to have receded very far with time. But my friends died very young – the oldest was 25 – and of course, none planned on dying.
They are only 14 of the names on The Wall. There are more than 58,000 names now. And they are only a fraction of the toll we remember on Memorial Day.
The World Almanac & Book of Facts lists 54,246 dead in the Korean War; 407,317 in World War II; 116,708 in World War I; 2,446 in the Spanish-American War; 364,511 in the Union forces in our Civil War – the book gives no figures for the Confederate side; 13,328 in the Mexican War; 4,210 in the War of 1812 and 25,324 in the Revolutionary War.
While it is true that my friends died fighting for our country’s most basic ideals, and in an unsuccessful attempt to establish some of those ideals in another land, their sacrifice touches me on a more personal level.
I tend to think of my dead comrades in times of trouble. My problems pale in comparison with the finality of their deaths. Priorities become clearly perceived. I’m thankful for all of the happiness I’ve had and that they missed. I find comfort in their sacrifice.
So on Memorial Day, no matter what I’m doing, I will think of my friends again, of the enormity of all those names on The Wall, of all the others who died in all the other wars, and those they left behind.
Their passing should not be taken lightly.
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