In Poems and Trinkets, Emblems of a Public Mourning

Vietnam Memorial Makes Note of Its 100,000th Offering

In November 1993, someone named Jeff left beef ravioli, beer and a pack of cigarettes for Eddie, along with a note giving a clue to their history. (By Lois Raimondo -- The Washington Post)

A widow named Margaret left a photograph addressed to Pete when she visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It was of a smiling young man in a dark tuxedo -- their son.

"Here's Guy's graduation picture," she wrote in an accompanying note. "You would be so proud of him, he's such a fine young man. . . . I think I have done a pretty good job of raising him."

Someone else left behind a baby's sandal; someone else, a watch for a friend who always asked the time. Every day since the memorial opened in 1982, National Park Service rangers have gathered up the poems and Purple Hearts, the battle ribbons and dog tags and combat boots that visitors bring to the monument.

Secured in the agency's museum resource center in Landover, some of the items were on display there yesterday as officials marked the 100,000th offering at the Wall.

Mostly anonymous, the items underscored the power of the memorial as a way for people to commemorate, communicate with and even apologize to friends and relatives who died in the Vietnam conflict. "I could've done more for you guys, I'm sorry," wrote someone in a note that accompanied a wreath made of barbed wire.

When the memorial was planned, no one foresaw this ritual developing, said Jan C. Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. But fate was cast during the monument's construction, when a Purple Heart was placed in concrete that had just been poured. "That is not an urban legend," Scruggs said yesterday.

The memorial quickly became something of a shrine, he said, and introduced a new chapter in public grieving.

"The items left at the Oklahoma City tragedy, the World Trade Center, the AIDS quilt, even the small memorials we see each day on highways are traced to how America changed the way it mourns," Scruggs said. "This is healthy, and it is a debt we owe to the Wall and those engraved thereon."

People who brought their treasures to the Wall left them behind to the mercy of the elements. But the items are receiving museum-quality treatment by the Park Service, which also takes care of 43 other collections, from battlefields and other historic sites, at its massive warehouse.

Some of the items, such as the multicolored Harley Davidson motorcycle donated by the Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans on Memorial Day 1995, have toured the country. Scruggs said many will wind up in a rotating exhibit at the planned Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center, an underground educational facility he hopes to construct near the monument in a few years. The project still needs final approval from the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts.

From the beginning, the Wall, which receives about 4 million visitors a year, has served a different purpose than other monuments on the Mall. It has even spawned a book, "Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial," published in 1987.

"The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is unlike other memorials," said Bill Line, a spokesman for the Park Service. "Vietnam was a different war from what other wars were because of how it all transpired, the protests and everything so strong. The Wall was a memorial constructed for healing. The World War II Memorial, in contrast, is a memorial to triumph."

Even without much information on their history or the relationships behind them, the offerings have the power to make people cry, even three decades after the war ended. Some are incredibly simple: a small china figurine of a chubby boy and girl beneath an umbrella, a baseball, a hunting knife.

"The first thing that brought me to my knees when I visited the Vietnam memorial was a pair of combat boots I saw," said Janis Nark, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Vietnam veteran, who had tears in her eyes as she viewed items yesterday. "They were just a well-worn, dirty pair of boots, but you knew they had been in the dirt in Vietnam."

Karen Spears Zacharias, whose father, Staff Sgt. David Spears, died in Vietnam in 1966, said she often visits the memorial to leave "tons of pictures" of her four children. She sees it as "an altar."

"It's the only place in the world where I can see my father eye to eye" because of the placement of his name, said Zacharias, who serves on one of the memorial boards. "I feel close to my dad when I'm there."

Someone named Jeff visited the Wall in 1993 to be close again to his old friend Eddie. He left behind a pack of cigarettes, a can of beer, a can of Chef Boyardee beef ravioli -- and a note that hinted at what the two of them had been through together.

"In the ancient Egyptian doctrine of eternal life the 'ka' (the double) has to be fed to continue its existence into eternity," he wrote. "So that your 'ka' will not starve and then die, I have brought this for you, and it all duplicates the great feast of August, 1967."