Rescue

Kevin.“
    He waited, then said, “I’m not supposed to know your name, right?“
    “You must be Dean’s List, smart as you are.“
    Yeah,“ Kevin said, nodding. “My parents are real proud.“

    Outside the shop, the sky had clouded over, more covering e sun than threatening rain. Inside a drugstore, I used a pay phone to call Justo Vega’s office, leaving word with his secretary on the flight number and arrival time for “John Francis.“ Then I went to a rotating display of sunglasses and picked out the biggest-lensed aviators they had.
    The woman at the cash register smiled. “You must be thinking the sun’s gonna come back out today.“
    “Yeah. Yeah, that’s why I need them, all right.“

    The third Washington cabbie of the morning said, “This is it.“
    “You sure? I don’t see it.“
    “Word of honor, Mac. It’s over there, kind of built into the knoll, where all the people are walking. You might want to start with the cluster, depending.“
    “Depending on what?“
    He lowered his voice. “On why you’re here.“
    I paid the fare, got out, and went over to the cluster.
    As I approached it, I could see that the bronzed statue was surrounded by lush, tended grass, like the greens of a golf course. Somehow I didn’t expect that, maybe because most of the grass I saw in Vietnam was higher. And rougher.
    The cluster itself is three soldiers, grunts in the bush, wearing fatigue uniforms, the trousers bloused into the tops of their boots. One is African-American, another is White, and the third is hard to tell, because he’s got a boonie hat on. Which is just as well, that way you can use your imagination for who he’d be. The black has a towel around his neck and an M-16 in his left hand. The white isn’t holding anything-The guy in the boonie hat, though, has a heavy M-60 machine gun across his shoulders and belts of ammo for it across his chest. None of them look glad to be there. The sculptor got that part right, too.
    At the base of the cluster were mementos, a few miniature American flags but mostly little wreaths and bouquets of flowers. The flowers were all different sizes and colors, a lof like the grunts depicted in the statue and the hundreds W thousands of others they represent.
    The cabbie was right about starting at the cluster. It let me work my way over to the Wall. Or, more accurately, let me work my way up to the Wall, even though it was on the same level as the cluster.
    The beginning of the path to the Wall itself has steel gray cobblestones, maybe five inches square, the ones at the center of the path grouted, the ones to the sides with blades of the good grass growing up between them. A black sign has ghostbuster diagonal stripes through words and logos that prohibit food, drink, smoking, bicycles, and running.
    I don’t think they had to warn against the running part. The people moved slowly along the path, as the cobblestones gave way to large pieces of slate. I was approaching the Wall from the west, the structure itself beginning as an acute angle with only a few names on it, then gradually growing taller, section by section, until it peaks in the middle. It then grows shorter again, like a compressed boomerang with its center point aiming upward, forming a sort of retaining wall for the knoll. The stone is black and glossy, I would have said marble until I heard someone else, reading from a guidebook, say granite. Small bunkerlike humps rise from the ground at six-foot intervals, footlights to illuminate the names at night. Over fifty-eight thousand names.
    I decided to walk the length of the Wall once, just to get used to it a little. At the center there’s wording that a lot of people stopped to read. It says that the names of the men and women who served and died or were reported missing are inscribed in the order they were taken from us.“ Each name is chiseled into the stone, diamonds separating one another like mini-tombstones. The listing of the lost begins with 1959 at the center, the highest point of the Wall, then runs eastward as the Wall tapers, the sequence beginning again at the far, tapered section of the west Wall, where I had started.
    As I oriented myself, an elderly couple was putting a question to one of the volunteers, who stood beside a park ranger. The volunteer was about my age and wore a ball cap, placket shirt and blue jeans. He showed the couple how to take a rubbing using artist’s graphite on paper against the name they wanted to