Reflections on a Wall : Replica of Vietnam Memorial Helps Visitors Come to Terms With Loss

Retiree Bob Hoke was standing a discreet distance from the replica of the famous monument, thinking, “If it wasn’t for the good Lord, my kid would be up on that wall,” when the two boys approached him.

They wore droopy backpacks. They had the loose and slap-happy gait that marked them as being about 13, somewhere between their last Little League at-bat and their first French kiss. When they stopped alongside Hoke, they hunched their shoulders, not sure if they should interrupt him.

“Um,” one said, “what is, you know . . . this?” He flicked two fingers at the low, black, aluminum replica throbbing in the hard wind at Warner Ranch Park.

Hoke told him it was the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

“See?” the second boy jeered at the first. “I told you. It’s for all the people who died in wars.”

No, Hoke corrected. It bore the names of only those Americans who died in the Vietnam War, more than 58,000 of them.

The first boy screwed up his face. “All those names? In one war?” he asked, looking at his friend for assurance that he wasn’t being duped. “Wow. Awesome.”

Hoke, a World War II and Korean War veteran who lives in Canoga Park and is the father of a helicopter door gunner who’d made it back from Vietnam safe and sound, watched the boys amble toward the wall.

They stood there reading names. They didn’t stay long. Soon they were sauntering across the grassy park in the direction of Warner Center’s glass towers.

“The most important thing about this wall is what it should mean to the young people,” Hoke confided. “They need to learn that this is what can happen when you don’t use your heads. It’s unfortunate that people can’t live in peace without somebody somewhere being so greedy or having such an opinion that he can influence so many other people to his way of thinking and start something like this that would cost so many lives.

“This buddy of mine, he come out and he stopped by the house after he was here, and he pointed out that 10% of the names on the wall are from California. We gave up this many kids?”

From the beginning, the wall was a most unusual war monument. No oversize heroic figures of fighting men. No pedestaled pieces of war machinery. It was simply a catalog of victims, a compilation of loss.

Over the last 15 years, the wall has accomplished its primary mission. Both the massive granite original in Washington, D.C., and the half-sized, movable version on display in the park from Friday morning until Sunday night, have helped tame the national post-traumatic stress disorder that was the principal legacy of the Vietnam War.

People are still duly reverent when they visit the wall. Some eyes still water. But going to the wall has been subsumed into the rhythm of ordinary life. Reading and rereading the names, the most affected generations of Americans relived their country’s most conspicuously unwon war over and over again until its emotional content finally drained into the becalmed ocean of history. That’s the classic therapy for PTSD.

Nowadays perhaps the most striking impression the wall makes on visitors relates to the extreme youth of those whose names are engraved on it. The average age of the combat soldiers in Vietnam was 19. In World War II, it was 26.

This impression has become clearer as the Vietnam generation ages, having lived more years since the war than most of those named on the wall lived, period.

At the wall in Warner Ranch Park, 49-year-old Dean Walker of Glendale knelt on one knee and tried without much success to get a pencil-rubbing of the name Thomas Pinatelli.

“He was my best friend from high school,” said Walker, a slender man with a trim, graying beard, a roofer by trade. “He wanted me to go into the Marine Corps with him, but I waited. He was interested in proving to his dad that he was a man.”

Pinatelli died Feb. 10, 1968, 19 days before Walker himself volunteered for the draft.

Walker went to his friend’s funeral, and in the ensuing years, time seems to have softened and rounded the edges of his memory of Pinatelli’s death. Yet he found he was unable to sit through the movie “Uncommon Valor.”

The thought of the fateful decisions he and his friend had made at so young an age shook him to his cautious, middle-aged core.

“It just really tore me up. I never got to say goodbye to him. He went, and I didn’t go, and we didn’t write. That sort of thing. You thought, ‘Hey, I’ll see him when he gets back on leave.’ But I didn’t want to go into the Marine Corps. You know, we were 18 years old. I was still pretty much a boy.”

Nearby, a bespectacled blond woman carefully read name after name. She wished to remain anonymous, she said, but allowed that she was a 1964 graduate of University High School in West Los Angeles. She’d come to find the names of classmates.

“I’ve located just a couple of them,” she said. “One fellow that I dated, I found him. Mike Davis. We weren’t a major romance. We just dated awhile, and then he was called to go.”

When she was a few years older, she said, she worked as a stewardess for Pan American Airlines in Asia and helped ferry soldiers from various rest-and-recreation spots back to the war zone.

“Sometimes when we’d land in Saigon, I wanted to block the doorway and say, ‘Nobody under the age of 24 gets off!’ They were all so young, my God.”

Bob Hoke is right. The wall ought to have the most meaning for young people. But, of course, that’s not the way the great assembly line of the generations works.

Nonetheless, those two boys ambling off across the park with their backpacks reflected its reality more poignantly than the graying, paunchy war vets who dutifully muster wherever the wall travels.

On line 113 of the east column of panel 16 of the wall is the name of Thomas Mastroianni, who died of wounds at age 21, never having seen a son born while he was in Vietnam.

Maz was my best friend, in a different, less sunny place, when we were at the giddy age of the backpack carriers. No one could have foreseen that eight years later he would be dead, or that 30 years after that I’d be contemplating all this.

I doubt that our reading the names on a wall of war dead when we were 13 somehow would have prevented an untimely end for either of us. That didn’t keep me, however, from hoping it does for the boys in Warner Ranch Park.