WASHINGTON — 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. It is one of the few things he has left of his father.
On Wednesday, 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 Wednesday 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 in the afternoon and continued until midnight in observance of the 25th anniversary of the Wall. The reading resumed at 5 a.m. Thursday and was to 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 Wednesday’s first reader.
He was 4 when his father died, so he 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.
In college, he, too, signed up with the Army and eventually joined the same Green Beret unit in which his father had served.
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.
He waged a campaign to have those few extra letters chiseled on the Wall, and he succeeded a year later. The name was everything he had left, he said. He visits the memorial at least every other year.
“It’s a powerful feeling to look at your reflection in the Wall and touch that name,” said Cramer, 54. “It’s good for my soul to touch that name and tell him I’m trying to live up to it.”
