Vietnam veteran Ralph Sulek (at right), who served in the Navy, visits the Wall the Heals Aug. 13 in Taylor.
By SUE SUCHYTA
Sunday Times Newspapers
TAYLOR – The Wall That Heals, a three-quarter scale traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., bore silent witness to lost lives Aug. 13 to 16 at Heritage Park.
The traveling memorial is 375 feet long and 7.5 feet high at its tallest point.
Names on the wall are arranged by date of casualty and alphabetically within a day. Volunteers with directory guidebooks helped visitors find a specific person’s name based on their panel location.
A mobile education center travels with the wall, and is designed to help visitors better understand the war.
The wall contains 58,281 names, eight of whom were women serving as nurses.
The deadliest year of the war was 1968, with the average age of those who died 23 years and one month old.
The youngest American who died, who falsified his birth record, was 15 years old.
There are 43 sets of brothers on the wall, and three sets of father and son losses.
Volunteer Rozanne Sweet said they have a guidebook by name, state and date of birth to help people locate a particular name on the wall.
She said that while The Wall That Heals only lists those who died in Vietnam, many who served died as a result of exposure to Agent Orange, a powerful chemical herbicide and defoliant, or as a result of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Volunteer and Vietnam veteran Frederick Warner, who served in the Army from 1969 to 1970, said he was a door gunner on a helicopter firing a weapon.
“I had a real bad problem for eight years when I come home,” he said. “I feel glad that these guys are memorialized.”
Warner said many of them were treated badly when they got home.
“Our country was split in half, one good, one bad, and we don’t know what to do with it,” he said. “I do feel that I get respect doing this volunteer work for these guys.”
Vietnam veteran Ralph Sulek, who served in the Navy, said his next-door neighbor, who was his best friend and a Marine, died in Vietnam and is on the wall.
“We lost him in Da Nang,” he said. “It was a year after I graduated from high school.”
Sulek said he was in Vietnam in 1969, and was in the service from 1968 to 1972, serving on a ship.
He said there are so many people who were lost whose names are on the wall, and it stirs up feelings about the loss of his best friend.
“It was a long time ago, and I think that I healed from that, and it’s nice to remember,” Sulek said.