The writing on the wall: one encounter at the Vietnam Memorial.

• Author: Kovach, Bill

Because it was our first televised war, the men and women who fought in Vietnam were individualized. No longer merely chess pieces in an abstract strategic game, soldiers appeared in our homes nightly, engaged in flesh-and-blood carnage. As with previous wars, when the killing stopped we felt compelled to remember those who died. Memorials to our war dead are, after all, a ubiquitous piece of the American landscape. But the war in Vietnam is the first from which we collected the names of the dead on a single roll call in a single place.

With a magnetic power, the black wall of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington draws visitors to it. For those who come, there is almost always a need to tell the story of a familiar name they find inscribed there. It is part of some lesson we seem to have promised ourselves to learn from this memorial. One of my stories is the story of Homer L. Pease, a big red-headed tackle on our high school football team in Johnson City, Tennessee. In 1950, when I met him, Homer was finishing a high school education interrupted by World War II. He had lied about his age and at 15 had survived the Battle of the Bulge with the 101st Airborne. Homer pretty much controlled his side of the...