We were barely on the interstate two days later, heading fifty miles north with Uncle Dex to Washington, DC, when he asked if we wanted to learn some Vietnam War songs.
“Sure,” said Greg, sounding genuinely interested.
“Uh, okay, I guess,” I said, trying not to sound embarrassed, though of course I was.
“Thank you, sir,” Julie said, sounding very formal and polite. Then she added, “But I have been told that I should not be allowed to sing in public.”
Uncle Dex drummed on the steering wheel. “Who told you that?” he demanded. “Of course you should sing. Everybody should sing, whether they can hold a tune or not.”
Julie stiffened in the backseat. “Were you told that I cannot hold a tune?” she asked.
Uncle Dex shook his head. “Wasn’t told anything,” he said. “Just making a point. My dad — Anderson’s Pop Pop — was tone-deaf as could be, but when we went to church he made us sit on one of the pews right up front, and whenever there was a hymn, he would totally belt it out. Embarrassed Anderson’s mom, but not me. I sang as loud as I could to try to keep up with him.”
He winked back at me in the rearview mirror. “Now who wants to sing?”
The first song was called “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” and it was about soldiers in the army wanting to be selected for this elite fighting unit they called the Green Berets that did a lot of stuff during the Vietnam War. Uncle Dex said they were supposed to be these awesome guerilla fighters, and right away I wondered if maybe Z might have been a Green Beret. Those secret missions he went on, under cover of darkness, working with just a few other men. It sure sounded like it.
Unfortunately, he wasn’t around for us to ask, or if he was in the car I hadn’t seen him yet. I just hoped he’d manage to be there somehow.
After that, Uncle Dex taught us an antiwar song that demonstrators used to sing on college campuses and stuff to try to get the president to end the war. It had a really long, funny name — “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” — and it was making fun of people who wanted to go to war, and generals and people who made bombs and stuff like that.
I got a weird feeling in the middle of that one that was hard to explain, but like maybe Z was there after all, even though I still couldn’t see him, and he didn’t like the song one little bit.
“Uh, Uncle Dex?” I said, interrupting. “Any chance we could sing something else besides this one?”
Uncle Dex said sure, but the next one was an antiwar song, too, and somebody or something didn’t seem to like that one, either, because we suddenly seemed to be hitting every bump and crack and pothole on the highway and it didn’t stop until we finished with the last verse.
When we finally got to Washington we miraculously found a parking space on Constitution Avenue, not far from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
“This way,” Julie said when we got out of the car, even though we could all see the sign and the arrow.
We were practically standing on the memorial before we realized it, because the sidewalk we were on just sort of gradually sloped down into this little valley next to the black granite wall that started off really short and then grew at the lowest — or highest — point to where it was way above our heads. Even with the descriptions from Julie and Greg, I was still expecting a statue or something, but it was just as they’d said — a sort of gash in the side of this hill and all the names of America’s Vietnam dead neatly chiseled into it, arranged in order of when they died.
The Wall was polished so clean that as you stood there looking at all the names — nearly sixty thousand of them — you also saw yourself, staring right back at you. It was impossible to not reach out and touch The Wall and trace some of the names with your fingers, which also meant you were sort of touching a part of yourself as well when you did that.
All of us got really quiet. There were a lot of other people there, too, but except for a few people whispering, we couldn’t hear anybody or anything besides our own breath and the distant sound of cars on the road.
Uncle Dex spoke to us softly. “There are directories up the hill,” he said, pointing in the direction of the far end of The Wall, toward the Lincoln Memorial. “You can look up a name and find out where that person was from and when exactly he or she died.”
“Are there many women on here?” Julie asked.
“Not a lot,” Uncle Dex said. “I think just eight or nine. Most of them were nurses helping out the sick and wounded. There’s actually a statue up the hill, too, for the women who served in Vietnam. We can go see it whenever you guys want. There’s a statue of some soldiers, too, that they added after they built The Wall. But The Wall is still what people come to see.”
“And to touch,” Greg added.
After about fifteen minutes, we walked up the hill to look at the statues Uncle Dex had described, and to get a closer look at the Lincoln Memorial farther on, and this long reflecting pool that runs from the Lincoln Memorial up the Mall, practically to the Washington Monument.
I kept wanting to go back to The Wall, though. I wasn’t sure why. It was just this sort of gravity thing pulling me there, or that’s how it felt. Greg must have felt it, too, because while Uncle Dex and Julie stayed next to the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, Greg and I wandered back down to The Wall.
We stopped for a couple of minutes and waited while what looked like a family stood all together blocking the walk. They were holding one another and taking turns tracing a name on The Wall with their fingers. A girl about our age held a sheet of paper over the name and rubbed over it with a piece of charcoal so the name made an impression when she peeled it off. She showed it to an older lady who might have been her grandmother, and the grandmother hugged her especially hard. They all eventually left, except the grandmother, who knelt down in front of The Wall below the name they had been touching and tracing. I was pretty sure she was praying at first, and then, looking up, whispering something in the direction of the name.
When she got up to go join the rest of her family she left something behind: an old photo. Greg and I saw it when we walked past after they were gone. It was a young man in an army uniform, hugging a woman in a wedding dress. They both looked really, really young.
“Do you think the girl in the wedding dress was her?” Greg asked me, gesturing toward the retreating back of the woman who had left the photo.
“Maybe,” I said, looking at the name that had drawn the family there. I pointed. “And I bet that was the guy in the picture.”
“I wonder how long they were married?” Greg asked.
“Well, if that was them, then I guess long enough to have a family,” I said. “But not long enough to get to raise their kids together and watch them grow up.”
An older man in a faded army jacket came up to us. He wore a name tag that read “Jan Scruggs.” “Hi, kids. I’m Jan, one of the volunteers,” he said. “Is there anything I can help you with today?”
Greg jumped right in with the questions. “What do you do with stuff like that?” he asked, pointing to the photo the woman had left behind.
Jan nodded. “Good question,” he said. “Flowers and stuff, we let them be until they wilt, and then we have to remove those. Other things, like pictures and poems, we collect and they go into an archive that the National Park Service set up. None of that gets thrown away.”
“What other kinds of things?” Greg asked.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Jan said. “Pretty much you name it, we’ve seen it. Lots of pictures. Dog tags. Letters. Baby shoes. Awards. I have a few buddies on The Wall so I’ve been volunteering here a long time.”
“We’re sorry for your loss, sir,” Greg said solemnly.
“Thank you,” Jan said with a thoughtful nod. “Are there other questions I can answer for you?”
“There are these diamond shapes next to most of the names, and crosses next to some, not nearly as many. Can you tell us what those are for?” I asked.
“Another good
question,” he said. “The diamonds are next to the names of those that were killed and their deaths could be confirmed. The crosses are the ones who went missing. If any of them ever turned back up somehow, they’re supposed to change the cross to a circle to show they’re still alive after all.”
“How many circles are there?” I asked.
He shook his head. “None.”
We thanked the volunteer and he walked on in the direction of the family we had seen earlier, and all at once it seemed as if nobody was there any more, just us.
But then, as if he’d just shown up out of nowhere — which I guess in a way he had — we saw Z, kneeling next to The Wall to the east, about halfway up the hill from the lowest point, tracing a name with his shaky hand. Greg and I looked at each other, rubbed our eyes, and looked back. He was still there, still touching that one particular name. We walked closer, our reflections walking with us in the black granite, but once we got close enough we saw that there was no reflection of Z, which was pretty spooky on the one hand, and pretty much made sense on the other.
“Hey,” Greg said softly once we were standing right next to Z.
“Hey, boys,” Z said without looking back at us, as if he’d been expecting we’d show up.
I glanced around and noticed a few people at the opposite end of The Wall, but if they thought anything weird was going on — like that we were standing there with a ghost — they didn’t do or say anything to show it. I was betting that they couldn’t see him. As we stood there Z had already started flickering in and out of view.
“I know this one,” Z said, indicated the name he had been tracing on The Wall. It had a cross next to it. “Zorn Miller.”
“Who was he?” I asked.
Z had nearly disappeared entirely, except for a sort of shimmering in the air, and his faraway voice, echoing behind him, saying, “Pretty sure it was me.”
Julie came up behind us a minute later. Greg and I were still standing where Z had left us, dumbfounded.
“Was that Z?” Julie asked.
I looked around to make sure Uncle Dex wasn’t with her, and then I nodded.
“And we know his name now,” Greg said. “Or at least we’re pretty sure we do. And he’s pretty sure.”
“What is it?” Julie asked.
Greg and I both pointed to “Zorn Miller” on The Wall. “He said this was him,” I said. “I guess ‘Z’ for ‘Zorn.’ ”
It was Julie’s turn to trace a name on The Wall with her finger. She was quiet for a minute, then she perked up. “We can find out where he died and when he died and everything,” she said. “Up the hill where they have the directories. We can find out where he was from, too. His hometown. Your uncle Dex said they have that in the directories as well.”
“He’s listed as missing,” Greg pointed out. “That’s what the little cross by his name means. But they never found him, so they just figure he must be dead somewhere.”
“But it’s a great start,” I added. “Where’s Uncle Dex, anyway?”
Julie nodded up the hill. “He stayed at the Lincoln Memorial. He said he’d be back in a little while to find us. We should go look up Z in one of the directories before he comes.”
It was hard tearing ourselves away from that place at The Wall, even though Zorn Miller wasn’t with us anymore, and even though we had all the information we were going to get from being there. Maybe it was the strange way our reflections made us a part of The Wall, and connected us to all those 58,286 names, and all the men and women they represented.
We finally managed to pull ourselves away and trudge up the hill to see what else we could learn about Z.
The directory was pretty helpful, once we figured out how to use it. Actually, once Uncle Dex rejoined us and showed us how. He explained that the names on the wall were listed chronologically by the date a person either went MIA or died. We pretended we had just picked a name and panel at random — Zorn Miller, panel 39E — and wanted to see what we could find out about him.
“Well, see,” said Uncle Dex, flipping some pages. “Since it’s panel 39E that means we’re looking at soldiers who died or went missing the second week of February 1968. So that was at the height of the war. Most of our soldiers who died in Vietnam were killed that year, and in the years before and after.”
“What about our guy?” Greg asked. “What about Zorn Miller?”
I couldn’t see Z, but I had a sense that he was there all the same, looking over our shoulders and taking it all in.
Uncle Dex studied the directory some more, flipped some more pages, went back and forth for a couple of minutes. The afternoon sun, meanwhile, slipped behind a dark cloud and we all felt the same autumn chill — judging from the way Greg, Julie, and I all shuddered at the same time.
“You guys getting cold?” Uncle Dex asked, though he didn’t wait for an answer because he found Z just then.
“Here he is!” Uncle Dex practically shouted. “Zorn Miller. Missing in Action. Casualty Date: February 14, 1968. Date of Birth: July 28, 1941. Home of Record: Barstow, California. Brand of Service: Army. Rank: Sergeant. Casualty Province: Quang Tri.”
It was so much information, all of a sudden, that my head was spinning from trying to take it all in. Julie’s brain worked a lot faster than mine, though.
“He was only twenty-seven years old,” she said.
Greg shook his head. “I thought he was a lot older,” he whispered to me.
“Yeah, I know,” I whispered back. “He looked a lot older to me, too.”
“What’s that?” Uncle Dex asked. He’d heard us, but not what we’d said.
“Oh, nothing,” Greg responded. “We were just saying we wondered where that place was and all — Quang Tri. And does it say how he died or anything? Or, I mean, how he went missing, or where exactly he went missing from? Stuff like that?”
“I’m pretty sure Quang Tri was the province in South Vietnam that bordered with North Vietnam during the war,” Uncle Dex said. “If I remember my Vietnam geography right. So that would be where the Demilitarized Zone was. And 1968 — that was the worst year of all for the war. There was the Tet Offensive, the My Lai Massacre, the Chicago protests, the Paris peace talks. So much went on that year.”
Greg scratched his head. “Uh, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any of those,” he said.
Uncle Dex started to close the directory, but a quick-thinking Julie reached in and bookmarked the Zorn Miller page with her hand.
“I just thought I might take some notes on what we found out about that soldier,” she explained, trying her best to look innocent. She pulled out a pen and small notebook, which of course she had with her at all times, and jotted everything down.
Uncle Dex turned his attention back to Greg. “I’m sure it would be interesting to look that all up,” he said. “It was a really important year in our history. And in Vietnam’s history. You might say it was the year we lost the war, even though the fighting went on for five more.”
I felt really excited, thinking about all there was to learn, but I felt really tired, too, thinking about all the work we still needed to do.
“One other big thing from that year,” Uncle Dex said. “You’re definitely going to want to know more about it if you’re interested in the war. And it might have even been where Sergeant Miller went missing in action, because it all happened in Quang Tri Province around that time.”
“What was it?” Julie asked, her pen poised over her notebook.
Uncle Dex grinned. “You’re quite the reporter, Julie,” he said.
“Thank you,” Julie replied in her most serious voice. “And that ‘other big thing’? You were just saying?”
“The Siege of Khe Sanh,” Uncle Dex said, and then he spelled “Khe Sanh” for Julie so she’d have it down accurately in her notes. “The beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam.”
We were all over our iPhones the whole way home from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — looking up everything Uncle Dex ha
d mentioned that happened in 1968.
The Paris peace talks obviously didn’t have anything to do with Zorn Miller, since they took place in France, and the U.S. delegation and the North Vietnam delegation apparently spent a lot of their time just arguing about the shape of the table they would sit around. Julie seemed personally offended by that. “I think they acted like little children,” she said. “And while people were being killed in battles!”
“That’s the nature of those sorts of negotiations,” Uncle Dex said. “Everybody wants to have the upper hand.”
While Julie was getting the lowdown on the Paris peace talks, Greg was looking up My Lai — which Uncle Dex had pronounced “Me Lie.” It was a tiny village where some U.S. soldiers killed hundreds of women and children and old people. It was one of the most terrible things that happened in the war, and we all got really upset reading about it over Greg’s shoulder. There were these awful, awful pictures of people who had been killed and thrown into a ditch. Some were just babies.
“Why did they do that?” Greg asked out loud, his voice shaking. “We were supposed to be the good guys. I mean, we’re always supposed to be the good guys. Right?”
Uncle Dex tried to explain, but even he had a hard time with it. “Sometimes things happen in war,” he said. “They talk about ‘the fog of war,’ where it’s hard to see clearly what’s going on, or what you’re supposed to do, or who’s your enemy and who’s your friend. Even if you believe in what you’re doing, and even if you’re really brave like most soldiers are, to go into battle, it has to be about the hardest thing to do. People get kind of crazy, or scared, or just angry that their fellow soldiers, their friends, have been hurt or killed, and so they start to think everybody is the enemy. That was the case with some of the men who were responsible for My Lai, or that’s what I read, anyway.”
“But it even happened to babies, what those soldiers did,” Julie said quietly. “There are pictures.” We were stuck on the interstate now, in slow-moving traffic — so slow you could probably get out and walk home faster, which is what my dad was always saying about the traffic jams he was in when he commuted to and from his job in DC.
Lost at Khe Sanh Page 5
