The coordinates are mere figures on a sheet of paper, a panel number and a line number where grief and honor intersect.
The Wall That Heals, a traveling model of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is in Greenfield through Sunday afternoon. For a number of visitors, certain names among the more than 58,000 etched into the panels stand out. Using a pencil, they lightly scrub over the names, stenciling them onto pieces of paper that go into keepsake boxes back home.
Two people who were collecting names this week were Monica Marling of New Palestine, and her mother, Diane. With the help of two volunteers, they were looking for four names on the panels when they visited the exhibit on Thursday: shipmates of her father who were killed when their vessel was attacked on the Mekong River. Charles Marling made it home, and he thought often of his friends who didn’t. His widow — Charles died in 2013 — and daughter collected the names and quietly reflected on the sacrifice of these men they never met but whose presence they often felt in their home.
Nearby, Tara Harter sat on the ground and held a paper near the bottom of one panel over the name of her brother, Vaughn “Skip” Brown, a Marine who was killed in Vietnam in July 1968. Harter, of New Palestine, thinks often of her brother, who was only 19 when he died. Bringing her grandchildren to this place and helping them stencil the name of their great-uncle onto keepsake sheets helps them understand the sacrifice made by the thousands of people whose names, from where they sit on the ground, reach almost to the sky.
