Where MIAs Are Never Forgotten

They are a place to compare memories, to look in a directory or a computer database for information about those who never came home. Two booths are run by the D.C. chapter of the nonprofit Rolling Thunder, and the others are run by individual activists.

Long volunteered six days a week until this past winter, when poor health forced her to cut back to weekends. She learned about MIAs from her husband, a Marine who survived two tours in Vietnam. He was later killed in a car accident.

Since 1972, she's worn a bracelet honoring Gary LaBohn, an Army sergeant who'd gone missing four years earlier.

"It becomes your extended family," she said yesterday between customers. "When you wear one of these bracelets, it's like he becomes your brother. As long as you wear the bracelet, it means he's not forgotten."

More than once, Long has watched two strangers looking at the same patch at her booth discover that they served in the same unit and know the same people. More than once, she has met people who served with her husband.

But nothing is as important, she said, as when the families of MIA servicemen stop by "and they thank you for being here and for not forgetting about" their loved ones.

Another booth was manned by Lee Roy Joyner, 60, a Vietnam veteran from Southeast Washington who has volunteered for nine years "in memory of all the guys who served and didn't come back."

Joyner said he likes talking to veterans and handing out wooden disks imprinted with patriotic slogans. The young guys get the ones that say, "9-11 Remembered" and "You can run but you can't hide." The older guys get the ones that say, "Some gave all, all gave some" and "University of South Vietnam: School of Warfare."

"We all graduated from there," Joyner said.

Those who stopped by yesterday included Eugene Simpson, 27, a staff sergeant paralyzed from the waist down 13 months ago by a roadside bomb in Iraq. Simpson, of Dale City, sat in his wheelchair, looking through the display case at a patch from his old Army unit.

Nearby, Navy veteran Jerry Cunningham was looking up information about missing veterans on a laptop and using an engraving machine to make custom POW-MIA bracelets.

"I don't want this issue to go away," said Cunningham, 66, who spent parts of every year from 1965 to 1972 in Vietnam. "What's done is done. We can't change that we left people behind. We need to make sure that it never, ever happens again."

Staff writer Sue Anne Pressley contributed to this report.