Folks:
I talk so rarely about Vietnam that I bet some people don't know I went.

I'm going to tell a true story about a day in my life that was extraordinary. It is particularly puzzling to me because I have never been one to believe in pre-destination, clairvoyance, ESP, numerology, astrology, or that kind of thing. As I have explained to people who may lean that way from time to time, though, I am practical, but open minded. Just because I have seen neither alien nor ghost, and consequently do not believe they exist here, does not mean that I have closed my mind to the possibility that they do, and with the proper evidence, I could accept those things as reality, since all we know is from faith, from logic, or from what we have experienced.

I have never been strong on remembering a timeline of my life, but figuring backwards, it was in 1982. I was employed in my first strange computer industry job, and was feeling lucky because I had to go on business to Washington D.C. from Richmond the day before the dedication of the so-called Vietnam Memorial Wall. I went to see it, but did not stay over to the following day for the formal dedication ceremony.

In 1967 when I went into the army, the only person I knew personally that had died in Vietnam was Gary Scott, from LeRoy. He was in my class, and I considered him a close friend, but I think everyone that ever knew him felt they were his close friend. He was that kind of a personality. I can still remember jokes he told me in science lab in 1963!

He died honorably in action as a lieutenant in the infantry just before I went over, but his death shaped the way I looked at the war, and indeed my time in the Army. But that is another story. Back to that day in 1982:

Since the dedication wasn't 'till the next day, signs weren't posted well or anything, I parked on the street and walked in the general direction on the mall where some people were grouped. I saw the monster black wall from a distance, seeing it gently sloping into the ground. Now this thing is 400 feet long, ten feet high (deep) in the middle, and has over 58,000 tiny names etched in it. The names and dates are almost invisible until you are right on them, being etched in the black granite. They seem endless and random, and only if you knew as I did later Maya Lin's design that names are arranged chronologically by death date. The first casualty is listed at the top of the middle, panels sequencing to the right on ever diminishing wall height till it disappears into the ground, then the names re-emerge on the left tip and end with the last name back in the center, to form a closure.

I would not believe this if someone else told me it happened to them, but I walked steadily and directly toward the wall until my face was inches from the wall and my eyes focused on the name GARY ARNOLD SCOTT. I went right to it! It is not even at eye level. To this day I still find it hard to believe. I visited the wall a few years later and even knowing generally where the name was, it took me five or ten minutes to find it again.

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