“We’re here,” Frankie said. “That’s enough for me.”
* * *
In a way, even with as far as she’d come, Frankie feared that the vein of fragility in her would open up when confronted again with Vietnam and all that had been lost there.
This morning, she stared at herself in the mirror, dressed in her fatigues, seeing the young version of herself staring back. She attached her ANC pin to her collar.
Outside the motel, in full daylight, she met up with Barb and Ethel; their husbands and children would be meeting them at the memorial. This, the beginning, was just for the girlfriends.
Each was wearing her fatigues and boonie hat and combat boots.
Barb smiled. “Don’t tell me there were no women in Vietnam.”
A ceiling of white clouds lay over the city. The air smelled crisp and cold, of the coming winter.
Here on the cordoned-off street, Vietnam veterans gathered; thousands of men, dressed in uniforms and fatigues, leather jackets with military patches on the sleeves, and torn jeans. There were veterans in wheelchairs and on crutches, some blinded and being helped along by friends. Thousands and thousands of Vietnam veterans, coming together for the first time in a decade or more. There was a feeling of reunion, joy. Men clapping each other on the back, laughing, hugging.
Someone with a bullhorn yelled out, “Brothers! Let’s go pay our respects!” and the crowd began to form itself into a parade line.
Frankie and Ethel and Barb joined the line of men.
Someone started to sing “America the Beautiful,” and others joined in, hesitantly, and then boldly. Their voices swelled in song. And crown thy good with brotherhood, from sea to shining sea. Frankie heard her friends and fellow veterans singing beside her. Spectators applauded from the sidewalks; car horns honked.
As they neared the National Mall, the vets fell quiet, all at once, with no one urging the sudden stillness. No more singing. No talking. No clearing of throats, even. They walked together, shoulder to shoulder, these men who’d fought in a hated war and come home to animosity and still didn’t know how to feel about what they’d lived through. Helicopters flew in formation overhead. As far as Frankie could see, the three of them were the only women, although they searched the crowd for nurses or Donut Dollies or other military women with whom they’d served.
At the Mall, an American flag fluttered in the cool breeze above a trio of bright red fire trucks. Supporters filled the grassy area, lined the Reflecting Pool, waited for the parade of veterans: children on their parents’ shoulders, families huddled together, mothers holding framed pictures of their lost sons, dogs barking, babies screaming. Five jets flew overhead; one peeled off from the rest. The missing man formation.
The welcome home these veterans had never received.
Veterans dispersed into the waiting crowd, joined their families, gathered in pods of old friends who hadn’t seen each other in years.
“Come with me,” Barb said, tugging on Frankie’s hand.
Frankie shook her head. “Go, girls. Be with your families. We’ll meet up.”
“You want to be alone?” Ethel said.
Frankie bit back her instinctive response. I am alone. “Go,” she said again, quietly.
Frankie moved forward on her own, through the crowd.
And then, there it was: The Wall. Gleaming black granite rising up from the green grass, the shiny surface alive with reflected movement. Honor Guards stood stationed at intervals along it.
Frankie was overwhelmed by the sight of it. Even from here, she could see the endless etchings on the stone. More than fifty-eight thousand names.
A generation of men.
And eight women. Nurses, all of them.
Names of the fallen.
In the distance, somewhere, someone tapped on a microphone, made a scratching, squealing sound that drew the attention of the crowd.
A man’s voice rang out. “No one can debate the sacrifice and the service of those who fell while serving … Standing before this monument, we see reflected in a dark mirror dimly a chance now to let go of the pain, the grief, the resentment, the bitterness, the guilt…”
As the speech went on, the speaker remarked on the world the veterans had come home to and the shame now felt by Americans who hadn’t welcomed their soldiers home. At last, the speaker said the words that Frankie and her fellow veterans had waited for all these years: “Welcome home and thank you.” The soldier next to Frankie began to cry.
The veterans sang “God Bless America.”
Their family and the visitors joined in.