58,256 Names Pierce Silence at the Wall

He was given his father's name at birth. Harry Griffith Cramer III, his birth certificate reads, the son of Harry Griffith Cramer Jr.

The name has stayed with him in a way his father couldn't. It has shaped and molded his life, guiding him through difficult times and giving him strength in moments of weakness. It is one of the few things he has left of his father, so he cherishes every letter of it.

Yesterday, he shared that name with hundreds of people gathered on the Mall, reading it aloud, deliberately and poignantly. And his was just the beginning.

Like a dam unleashed, the names poured forth yesterday at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- names of all the deceased and missing service members, set in the black granite panels -- one after another.

Family members and volunteers began reading the 58,256 names yesterday afternoon and were to continue until midnight in observance of the 25th anniversary of the Wall. The reading was to resume at 5 this morning and continue until late Saturday evening, with almost 2,000 volunteers taking turns.

As the son of the first Army soldier killed in Vietnam, Hank Cramer was chosen to be yesterday's first reader. He came an hour early to compose his thoughts beneath his father's name at Panel 1, Line 78.

"Harry G. Cramer Jr."

He was 4 when his father died and has only a few memories of him -- 30-second clips that have circled in his mind for much of his life: His father singing a cowboy song. Going for rides on his father's back. Tussling with him on the floor.

And then this scene: his mother explaining why an army chaplain had knocked on their door.

Throughout his childhood, his mother, a schoolteacher, tried to teach him what his father's death meant. She saved the uniforms and medals and the letters her husband wrote from Korea and Vietnam. On Memorial Day and Veterans Day, she took her son to his father's grave at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, and to give him context, they visited the graves of the academy's most famous graduates. This was who your father was -- a soldier's soldier, she told him.

So Hank Cramer set out to be the same. In college, he, too, signed up with the Army and eventually joined the same Green Beret unit in which his father had served, 1st Special Forces Group in Washington state.

In 1982, when he heard that a memorial had been built to honor the sacrifices of U.S. troops in Vietnam, he flew in to pay his respects, only to find his father's name missing. For political reasons, he discovered, the military had decided that war deaths of service members had not officially begun in Vietnam until 1959. His father had died Oct. 21, 1957.