Wall’s U.S. Tours Bring War’s Pain, Pride Home

It is time for John Devitt to go out again, time to pack up his portable replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and head across the country, collecting as he goes more emotional residue from a war that by strictest definition ended a quarter-century ago. After 16 years of traveling this circuit, Devitt knows what to expect.

For the next seven months, beginning with a first stop in Milwaukee later this week and rolling on until he reaches San Francisco in November, the 51-year-old Vietnam veteran will bring his half-scale model of the Washington, D.C., monument to America. There will be tears, reunions, speeches, anger. And, as they do at the foot of the actual wall, many people will leave behind tokens of remembrance.

“The artifacts,” Devitt calls them--paper roses, American flags, dog tags, poems, high school yearbooks, military documents, stuffed animals, POW-MIA bracelets, love letters, combat medals, antiwar polemics, baseball gloves, personal notes scribbled on scraps of paper, unopened beer cans and mysterious trinkets with messages meant to be understood only by those who left them and the spirit of someone whose name is among the 58,218 listed on the wall.

And after each stop, Devitt will scoop up these makeshift memorials and place them in cardboard boxes for shipment back to his base of operations, three stalls in a tan, slab-side building in an industrial park near downtown San Jose. There the boxes will be labeled by location and year and stacked with all the rest--some 1,500 boxes so far, roughly two for every stop the wall has made, all of them piled on industrial-grade pallet racks from floor to ceiling, each containing its own inventory of pain and pride and confusion.

From a box marked “Buffalo, N.Y., ‘95,” a flowery Hallmark card, titled “Thinking of You,” with this handwritten note inside:

Dear Joe, I was only 8 when the Army officials came down the driveway to inform us you were missing. I remember their stoic faces, the click of their shoes as they came near the door. The sound returned that night to inform us you were dead.

It’s been 26 years now, and I guess I’m not your little sister anymore, but I just want you to know there hasn’t been one day, brother, in these 26 years that I haven’t thought about you, loved and missed you . . .

Your little sister, Audrey Ann.

From a box labeled “Whidbey Island, Wash., 1997,” a black paper flower attached to a snapshot of a young man with blond hair and glasses, dressed in an olive green T-shirt and Army pants, seated on a cot, reading what appears to be a magazine, or maybe a letter. He is grinning, and in the frame of the photograph someone has written these words and no more:

James Hollister. Died June 28, 1970. He was due home, July 12th.

And from the “Colorado Springs, 1996,” box, a wallet-sized hospital photograph of a newborn girl, with this inscription printed on the back:

To daddy

Love, Lisa

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Here’s another artifact from the war. This one is in a box on the floor of Devitt’s office, a small room with a “University of South Vietnam” decal on the glass door and, on one wall, a mounted plaque that reads, “Complaint Department: Please Take a Number,” with a metal tag marked No. 1 dangling from the pin of a hand grenade.

The color photograph, labeled “LZ Sharon--Summer 68,” shows four soldiers, each identified with a caption in yellow type. There is “Rupert,” smoking a cigarette, scowling . . . and behind him “Pappy,” who appears to be about 60 years old . . . a smiling “Hjerpe” and, in the foreground, a bare-chested young man with curly hair, almost boyish features and a blank expression.

Printed over the soldier is this:

“Me.”

“You?” the man with the weathered face, long, braided ponytail running down his back, and beard streaked with gray is asked.

Devitt chuckles.

“Yeah, me.”

This was last Tuesday, and Devitt was in the final stages of preparing to leave for Milwaukee and points beyond--Hot Springs, Ark., Watertown, S.D., South Range, Mich., Weatherford, Okla.--16 weeklong stops in all. For the last week, Devitt had been engaged with chores that ranged from greasing trailer brakes to loading itineraries into a laptop computer to washing a last few loads of laundry for the road.

Devitt also made a little time to tell the story of a dreamy sort of “weekend project” that would evolve over the years into something much larger, more lasting. It was a story that could be told from one of many starting points, but Devitt chose to begin with his own first visit to the memorial in Washington in 1982:

“I had heard that they were going to build a Vietnam veterans memorial, and at the time it was going to be dedicated they were talking about a reunion. And that is what caught my ear, the reunion end of it. I needed to find somebody who remembered what I remembered about the experience. I had heard a lot of things, you know, but I never heard anybody voice how I felt about it.”

Devitt was living in San Francisco at the time: “I didn’t have enough money to fly to Washington, but my folks and a lot of friends chipped in and got me a plane ticket. I guess they figured it would do me some good. I went with a kind of negative idea about the wall: The fact that it was in the ground, like they were trying to cover it up, and that it was black--you know, mourning--and that it wasn’t a Vietnam vet who designed it.” (The wall was designed by Maya Ying Lin, a Yale architecture student at the time.) “Those all seemed like valid reasons to me not to like it. But then, once I got there and walked up to it, they might have been valid reasons, but they were totally irrelevant.”

Devitt, who grew up in San Jose, had served 18 months in Vietnam, from late 1967 to early 1969. He was an enlistee--”I signed up so I wouldn’t get drafted. Dumb, huh?”--in the Army, First Air Cavalry, a door gunner and crew chief on assault helicopters. And though he had experienced plenty of combat duty--three times, he said, helicopters in which he was flying were crippled by enemy fire--Devitt believed he had made it out of the war more or less healthy and whole. The wall would teach him something about that.

He had bounced around a bit after the war, worked in San Francisco taking care of apartment buildings, landed in some trouble and was sent for counseling at a veterans center. It didn’t take: “Everybody wanted to talk about guilt,” Devitt recalled, and that wasn’t exactly how he felt about the war. There was something more to it, and as he walked up to the wall he had a moment of revelation.

“You figure everybody that was over there had to come back angry. I know I did, and I didn’t even recognize it at the time. I mean, I was pretty self-destructive and destructive of others, without even realizing what was causing that. And it wasn’t until I walked up to the wall, and I realized what was making me angry was the fact that I didn’t think anybody cared, not about me, but about my friends who had been killed. Suddenly it felt so good that their names were out there in public.”

How many of the names on that wall, he was asked, were your friends?

A stare through tinted glasses.

“Fifty-eight thousand.”

No, how many did he know personally?

“There are five I remember real well.”

He went on: “The first thing I felt when I walked up to the wall was pride. And that was the one thing I never heard anybody mention in all the time I had been back from Vietnam. The pride, you know. And I had strong pride for the guys I was there with, just the fact that we were so committed to each other.”

He also was struck by what the wall had to say, in its powerfully simple way, about war--that it “is a serious thing, that it should be the last alternative, not the first or the second or the third, that it should be the very last, and if you are going to go to war the wall shows what the price tag is, the real price tag, and you have got to be willing to pay that kind of a price for whatever the final end product is. And if the end product isn’t worth it, then don’t even start, you know?”

All those names, each suggesting a story: “It makes it real personal,” he said. “You start looking at them and you are reading and you think, ‘Each name was a real person,’ and now that keeps magnifying, because they had mothers and fathers, they had brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends . . .”

From a box marked Buena Park/Hawthorne, ‘95, a business card of a health company administrator with a message scratched on the back. It must have been raining that day, because the ink has run. Still, it can be read easily enough:

I love you, dad.

I wish I knew you.

Love always, Nancy

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So Devitt returned to San Francisco and went about building a wall of his own. To save money for the project, Devitt moved out of his apartment and for months lived in his car. Friends were enlisted, mainly a couple of Navy vets named Gerry Haver and Norris Shears. There was much trial and just as much error, experiments with reversed negatives and silk-screening methods, with plastic and aluminum.

Someone suggested it should be made for travel, in panels that could be broken down and hauled in boxes. Someone else thought of arranging for local sponsors--veterans groups and the like--at every stop to underwrite expenses. Devitt began to see his wall as a way to bring what he experienced in Washington to veterans scattered across the country.

In October 1984, Devitt and his cohorts packed up the Moving Wall and headed off for Tyler, Texas, where they had been invited to set it up at the Tyler Rose Festival. They were just starting to assemble the panels when a mother who had lost a son in the war walked up. She was carrying an ornate red candleholder. She placed it by the wall, under her son’s name.

“She was one of the first people to leave something,” Devitt recalled, “and that was something we had never thought about: People leaving things like they do in Washington. . . . And then all kinds of people started leaving things. And at that time we didn’t know what to do, so we talked about it with the vets there in Tyler and everybody felt, well, they left it at the wall so it should stay with the wall.

“So we decided, OK, we will just mark what panel everything is in front of and pack everything up and when we get to the next place we’ll unpack everything and put it in front of the right panel again. Well, that worked for about two places. . . .”

Overwhelmed, Devitt decided to box up the artifacts and ship them back to San Jose. This has remained the standard procedure, and by now the main stall that he rents is all but overrun with boxes. Devitt is not sure what to do with them. He has talked of maybe finding an existing museum to display them one day, or perhaps opening one of his own someday. All he knows for certain, he said, is that he cannot throw any of it away.

“There is a lot up there,” he said, staring up at the cardboard mountain that runs up the back wall. A lot of hurt. A lot of questions. A lot of remnants.

From “Boonville, Mo., ‘97,” a poem written to James W. Agnew and attached to a portrait painted by an aunt, apparently from a snapshot. It shows a young man squatting in combat gear, his shirt opened to his belly, rifle cocked over one elbow, smiling, thinly, into the camera. The poem asks:

What would Jimmy see

If he were here by me?

Would he see any truth in the lies

That sent him far away to Vietnam

And stopped this boy

From becoming a man?

. . .

What would Jimmy do?

What would Jimmy be?

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Like the box pile, Devitt’s wall project has grown since its ragtag origins. Under the auspices of a nonprofit foundation, he now keeps three walls in circulation spring, summer and fall, hiring drivers to haul around the other two. (The Moving Wall, which passes frequently through Southern California, is scheduled for Rancho Palos Verdes in late May.)

Devitt, who works year-round on the project, takes no salary but lives most of the year on travel expenses provided by the local sponsors. Three walls are still not enough to meet demand. Nearly 300 applications to sponsor a visit by the Moving Wall were received last year, Devitt said, more than triple the number that can be accommodated.

Meanwhile, the Moving Wall now has competition. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which built the Washington wall, has launched its own portable replica, as has a large cemetery company. Devitt, who does not allow sponsors to use his version of the wall as a fund-raising vehicle, said it would be “irritating” if others turned out to be less diligent.

“Irritating” is Devitt’s favorite expression for a number of things he regards as threats to the wall experience. It is “irritating,” he said, when television crews stick their cameras in the faces of mourners. It is “irritating” when impostors come to the wall and try to pass themselves off as Vietnam vets. And when politicians show up to make speeches about domino theories and the glory of war, well, that Devitt finds as “irritating” as anything. It is not a memorial to a war, he has said at every stop. It is a memorial to the veterans who died in it.

Devitt has learned some things along the way. He has learned it can be emotionally taxing to spend too much time at the wall; he prefers, he said, to set up the wall and then step back and watch “from the tree line.” He has learned that, at least in their response to his visits, Americans are the same everywhere. And he has learned that this most likely will be his life’s work: “I didn’t plan it that way,” he said, “or even desire it to be that way.” It just happened.

He also has learned not to read or examine the artifacts after a setup; better simply to pick them up and move on. Later, back in San Jose, he will begin to look through the boxes, and once started it is difficult to stop. These artifacts, however cryptic, have stories to tell, and it seems wrong somehow not to listen:

A yearbook from an Alabama high school. One page has been marked and a circle drawn around a picture of a senior in a white shirt and thin tie. James Conrad Adams, the caption reads, “handsome is as handsome does.”

A king of hearts playing card with a note: “Jeff, thank you.”

A set of plastic toy soldiers, covered with mud.

A cookie fortune: “Friends long absent are coming back to you.” To which someone has added in ink: “They will in heaven.”

A poem from Stephanie to “Grandpa Jones”:

I have a special guardian angel,

Waiting for me in heaven.

I only know him through pictures. . . .

A message, soldier to soldier: “No one would bring us our mail, so you had to go get it that night, didn’t you? I miss ya. Sgt. Thomas.”

The marriage license of Velenda Enclarde and Paul Narcisse, dated May 18, 1967.

A government letter so badly burned that all that can be read are the phrases “Army presents this testimonial” and “Faithful Performance of Duty.” It is dated May 12, 1971, and signed “W.C. Westmoreland, General.”

And this, from a box marked “Defiance, Ohio, ‘95,” a collage on construction paper that includes pictures of the Deshler High School class of ’65 on a Washington field trip, students sipping comically through straws at a soda fountain, and the senior photograph of John William Jackson. There is an inscription: “Thirty years have not dimmed our memories of our friend.” And also, pasted in one corner, the Deshler High fight song:

Whether the odds be great or small

Our Deshler High will win over all

While our loyal sons and daughters

March on to victory!

Rah! Rah! Rah!

It took Devitt less than a minute to find the name in his computer.

“Here it is,” he said. “John William Jackson, Pfc Army, Deshler, Ohio. Born June 14, ’47. Killed Feb. 27, 1967.

“He’s on Panel 15E, Line 106.”

These are the sorts of things found in John Devitt’s boxes, and there are so many boxes.

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Lessons and Legacies: 25 Years After Vietnam

The longest war America has ever fought--and the first one it lost--Vietnam continues to provoke questions and evoke emotions both vivid and complex. The U.S. was involved in Indochina from the late 1950s until the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Throughout this month, The Times is examining the impact of that turbulent time on American society and popular culture and on institutions from the military to the media.

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