Memorial Day, Herman, Captains and Kings (5/24/1989)

Herman was a good friend from my boyhood. We lost track of one another, but when I first visited The Wall in D.C., I remembered him….with the impact off a howitzer. I wrote a column about him every Memorial Day for several years. Maybe I should have kept it up. We seem to have forgotten the lessons of that war.

 

Every year for Memorial Day I write a column about Herman.

Herman and I were in the same Boy Scout troop a long time ago. He was a garrulous, goofy, tow-headed farmboy with an endless supply of brothers and an infectious, horsey grin.

I remember one night at Camp Rainy Mountain, Herman set the whole troop laughing when, tossing in his upper bunk, he rolled out of bed and tumbled six feet to the ground.

Faking the voice of a little boy, he cried out: “I fall down go BOOM!”

Less than 10 years later, two days into his second tour in Vietnam, Herman stepped on a landmine and came home, accompanied by the usual telegram and flag.

At the Vietnam Memorial in D.C., Herman’s name is there, along with those of 57,000-plus other men and women who died for something they couldn’t see, feel or touch.

I didn’t believe in the war. I was one of those hippies who stood on the sidewalks and yelled obscenities at busloads of soldiers going to the war. I know now that I was yelling at the wrong people.

I don’t know if Herman believed in the war. But he believed in the system, however flawed it was. I suppose, coming from a large family, he knew that something could be imperfect  and full of dissent and still work.

Maybe that was stupid. Herman didn’t think so.

Now and then I get into D.C. and stand before the Black Rock. If you’ve never been there, the black granite from India is polished to a mirror finish. Into this surface is incised the names of the dead, in the order in which they died. It is that long fog of names stretching out in either direction, and the awful chronology of it, that helps chill one’s heart, makes one’s breath come hard.

I am told that there is no time of day or night that there is not somebody standing vigil at the wall, near some name that once went with a living person, some Herman that someone came to remember.

I once saw a grizzled old biker, his gray hair in a braid, his bare arms purple with tattoos, weeping unashamedly at the wall, his fingers resting on one name.

People often touch the names they know. It’s that kind of place. In the polished surface, reflections stare back silently at the visitors, like ghosts.

War is the stuff of history, a convulsion against which the milder records of treaties and coronations serves only as a backdrop. It is the breast at which callow historians nurse and the last tonic they imbibe in their dotage.

But it is not the historians who pay the price of the show, nor the policy-makers, who ordain that such things should be, but Herman, multiplied by 57,000, by however many millions of farm boys and store clerks who fell forever silent into some forgotten mud.

“The tumult and the shouting dies,” wrote Rudyard Kipling. “The captains and the kings depart.”

A wall full of names is too great a thing to contemplate. Who, after all, can envision that many deaths, individually, one by one hurling through the air like broken dolls? Not I.

I just think of Herman, and try to hope that in some way his short final arc through the jungle air meant something more grand than it seemed at the time.

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© 2007 Marsh Creek Media,

Gettysburg, Pa.

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