Engraved in Their Minds

He was 34 and handsome, with gray-flecked dark hair and a dark mustache. The photograph would later run on the cover of National Geographic, prompting wisecracks from old Army comrades that they had seen his picture in restrooms across the country.

It was 1982, and several hundred thousand people had gathered for the wall's Nov. 13 dedication.

Scruggs, who had been wounded in the war, launched the crusade for the Wall with his own money and then raised $8.4 million for the project in three years.

Architect Maya Lin's design -- a polished black granite chevron bearing more than 58,000 names of those killed or missing -- was at first controversial, but the Wall would become among the most visited memorials on the Mall.

That weekend, Kentes, of Falls Church, was reconnecting with a firefight in the Mekong Delta 13 years before. It was Memorial Day 1969, he recalled, when he saw two buddies, Curtis Daniels and Michael Volheim, killed.

Kentes and five other Army Rangers were chasing enemy soldiers when Daniels and Volheim were cut down by gunfire.

Kentes and two others counterattacked to retrieve their comrades' bodies, and Kentes believes he killed two enemy soldiers in the process.

It was the first of many such encounters, he said.

Sipping coffee and smoking a thin cigar in a Falls Church restaurant last week, Kentes, now with light gray hair, said he did not keep track of how many enemy soldiers he killed in Vietnam.

But there was pride in victory. When he and his fellow Rangers staged a successful ambush, it was: "You screwed up, and we didn't." In combat, "you get hardened," he said, "you get real, real hardened."

He was unemployed in November 1982, with a wife and a 6-month-old son, and had not put the war behind him. "I thought about it every day," he said. "Still do."

Vietnam veterans had been called whiners and losers by older veterans, and fools or worse by people of their own generation, Kentes said.