WASHINGTON — They are lined up like footnotes to the names etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s polished black granite, leaning against its base, some a collective tribute to the fallen, others bearing a message for just one of the dead.
An American Legion uniform cap from Kansas, a police patch from a town in Georgia, poems from middle- school students.
“We met once when you played golf with my dad,” reads one note, written hastily on a piece of yellow notebook paper, addressed to a Maj. Shaw. “You served together in Vietnam. He made it back to us. I’m saying goodbye.”
Since the memorial was completed in 1982, it has become a de facto shrine with more than 100,000 offerings for the dead and messages from survivors left by the millions who visit it each year. That number is likely to grow in the coming days. National Park Service officials say milestones like Veterans Day today and the memorial’s 25th anniversary on Tuesday inevitably lead to floods of new items at the wall.
Jan Scruggs, a veteran who came up with the idea for the memorial and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, said the wall changed the way people pay respects and grieve at memorials and at the sites of tragic events.
“It is a beautiful thing,” Scruggs said. “It shows that those who we know and who were a part of our lives and who aren’t with us any more still have an impact on us.”
