A Day of Reflection for Those Remembering Vietnam : Memorial: No official ceremony marked the 20th anniversary of the war’s end. But many veterans, others quietly honor the dead by visiting “the wall.”

The pounding rain and lead-gray skies kept the crowds and the tour buses away, and the politicians seemed to have no interest in coming out to observe the 20th anniversary of America’s greatest military defeat.

But that was just fine for the handful of veterans and other Americans who came out to “the wall” to remember the dead on Sunday, exactly 20 years after the fall of Saigon.

“The rain was a blessing,” said Vietnam veteran Charlie Harootunian, as the rain mixed with the tears streaking his face. He had flown in from Massachusetts just to spend the day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. “I realized as I was coming in from the airport that the rain would mean that the only people here on this day are the people who really care.”

Political Washington allowed Sunday’s anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War to slip by unobserved.

After all, nations tend to celebrate victories, not defeats. So there were no official ceremonies held during the day at the memorial, where the names of all 58,191 Americans who died in the conflict from 1959 to 1975 are etched in reflective black granite.

A Vietnamese American organization was the only group to mark the day, laying a wreath at the foot of the wall. Meanwhile, 23 other wreaths were left at the memorial, most brought by high school students who were not born 20 years ago.

The remembrance was so low-key that officials at the Arlington National Cemetery were unaware that an informal wreath-laying in honor of Vietnam veterans was held at the cemetery Sunday.

Yet the wall’s emotional power has always been extraordinarily personal, and the small, hardy bands of veterans, families and curious teen-agers who paid their respects Sunday had come for the wall itself, and not for speechifying. It was a day for reflection.

Some came burdened by their own memories. Others, the young, to see a piece of what for them is now ancient history. But all were drawn by the need to somehow mark the day that brought the longest war in U.S. history to a bitter end.

On April 30, 1975, South Vietnam crumbled and surrendered to the invading North Vietnamese, two years after the United States had signed a peace treaty with the North and pulled out its forces.

But even without American troops in the field at the time, the fall of Saigon was a humiliation for the United States, one that left the indelible image of a frantic evacuation by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. Embassy. In the final hours, as North Vietnamese tanks rolled toward downtown Saigon, U.S. Marines flew 70 helicopters for 18 hours nonstop, evacuating 5,500 men, women and children from the embassy grounds and 1,875 from the embassy roof to waiting aircraft carriers in the South China Sea.

Twenty years have healed many of the scars, and many who came Sunday seemed to have put some distance between their memories and their new lives.

“I think we have learned a lot as a country from Vietnam,” noted Tim Dressing, an Illinois car dealer who served in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970. “I think the Gulf War was a perfect example of a conflict where we had people who weren’t going to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam.”

Others also seemed to understand that the memorial now belongs as much to the teen-agers born after 1975 as it does to them.

“Vietnam changed the way our parents’ generation thinks. . . . I don’t feel like I totally understand what happened, but I thought this would help,” said Ann Fitlow, a high school student.

But it will take the passing of at least another generation before the wall is owned by history, like monuments to the Civil War or World War I, rather than the present. And so many of the visitors Sunday were still stirred to anger over the latest Vietnam controversy--a new book by former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who now says that the war was a mistake and that the United States should have withdrawn before 1963. The book has angered veterans groups so much that some are urging members to boycott the book and demand that McNamara donate the profits to Vietnam veterans.

“I thought it was self-serving to make comments like that, especially since he could have made a difference at the time and he chose not to,” said Michael Smith, of Rockville, Md.

Added an angry John Power, from Jacksonville, Ill.: “Why didn’t he stand up and speak at the time if he knew it was a mistake and a waste, rather than sending all these people out to be killed?”