Vietnam Wall
Share Article Omar said, In silence 58,235 angels sing as hammers and chisels work on a long black wall gouging earth. A team member cleans dusts off the name of Captain Harry G. Cramer of the 14th Special Forces Operational Detachment, October 21st, 1956. He was the first.
Maya Lin was 21 when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial design was selected out of 1,421 entries in 1981. Her entry was #1026.
I thought about what death is, what loss is, she said. A sharp pain that lessons with time but never quite heals over.
She visualized a knife cutting open the Earth and the Earth healing itself. The black granite wall is 493 feet long rising from the ground to a height of 10.1 feet bending at the center at a 125.12 degree angle.
Monument shadows lie heavy over men and women with memory tools. Slivers of black granite are collected by museums. They catalog memories for future generations. The exhibition goes on a Rolling Thunder tour.
Students receive questions on final exams pertaining to names, dates, places, over-sense of space and the under-sense of time’s prayer beads massaged by whorls leaving fingerprints on cave walls, Buddhist deity stones, tools and discovery evidence. Hammer music, chiseled symphonies and soft brushes sing forever.
As long as forever is, said Eternity.
After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.
He needs the antioxidants.
He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.
Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.
Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.
Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines. She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention.
She releases repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.
Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated obese white tourists.
Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.
Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.
Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan.
Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.
