Engraved in Their Minds

Jordan went to Vietnam that September and wound up with a battery on Hill 54 near a town called Tam Ky. One night, right after he arrived, the hill was attacked. Jordan was sent out to the perimeter to help. He exchanged fire with the enemy and found two dead Americans in a bunker.

He was 22, and his biggest fear was not that he might be killed, but that he might screw up: "Would I be a coward? Would I stand up when the time came?" he said.

The battle ended with daylight, and it was not until he returned to his battery that his knees started to shake. But he said to himself: "I survived, and I wasn't a coward."

There would be other attacks in other places in the next year, and Jordan would learn to sleep during outgoing barrages. Only incoming shells woke him.

He left Vietnam in the fall of 1969 and married an Australian woman he met on leave. "We took our uniforms off, threw them in the closet and tried to forget," he said.

By 1982, he had a good job. He and his wife had one daughter and were about to have a second. He had donated money to the Vietnam memorial project but decided only at the last minute to attend the ceremonies, wearing his old fatigue jacket with the blue division patch.

He and the other Americal veterans insisted on marching in the parade as a unit, rather than by state. Someone called out cadence, he recalled, and they tried to keep in step. At the Wall, he found the name of his friend Gerald Niewenhous, who had been killed in his helicopter in 1969.

Jordan said he has been lucky since the dedication. He received two college degrees and became a project manager with the Department of Homeland Security. "I often wonder, if I hadn't served, what would I have missed?" he said. "I think my life became richer. You learn about yourself. . . . I know who I am."

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Len Funk was on a business trip to Washington that weekend in 1982. He had been in the international moving industry for many years after the war and was moving to New York from Portugal. His wife, who was expecting their first child, urged him to stay and attend the ceremonies.

Vietnam once had been a big part of Funk's life. He had served there as an Army adviser for 20 months in 1969 and 1970 and went back in 1972 for 30 months as a State Department employee, he said in an interview at his home in Arlington.

He learned to speak Vietnamese and came to abhor the war's destruction. He admired the country's people: "Their life and their struggle really sunk in," he said. And he watched some of the war's final scenes as the North Vietnamese closed in and the United States withdrew.