Entertainment, Books - Army Times

Scenes from a Wall

Michael Sofarelli’s “Letters on the Wall” opens with an anecdote, probably apocryphal, about a naval officer who tossed his dead brother’s Purple Heart into some wet concrete at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall when it was under construction in 1982. The medal became part of the memorial’s foundations, writes author Michael Sofarelli, and it started a tradition of leaving small offerings there.

Even Marine Gen. Peter Pace, after his last day as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, left his four generals’ stars pinned to index cards Oct. 1 as a simple memorial to four buddies killed in Vietnam.

Sofarelli’s book collects many of these artifacts and letters left behind at the wall by 4.5 million visitors a year for 25 years. At just under 200 pages, “Letters” can only represent a fraction of the 85,000 items the U.S. Park Service has picked up and cataloged since 1984, but the small sample is no less heart-rending.

It can be difficult to turn the pages of “Letters on the Wall” and see family photographs, intimate letters and crude but powerful handmade memorials.

One is a cardboard placard covered with taped-on cigars that begins: “For 28 Christmas mornings I’ve thought of you and our last cigar together.” Another letter, left with a small bottle of Crown Royal whiskey, begins: “It gets harder to remember what you look like. I have to keep looking in the high school yearbook.”

The book is a compendium of the way Americans grieve. There are simple, wrenching notes, like the handwritten post office routing slip by Marine Sgt. Frank W. Spear that reads: “Twenty-five years later my heart is still empty and broken. God how I miss you.” But there are also portentous, multipage typewritten letters that seem more intended for preaching to other visitors at the wall than to remember specific fallen service members. There is a lot of poetry: “I knew you not/I knew you well/In my heart/and mind you dwell.”

And there is a range of bizarre grief items in the book, including messages written on a diaper, a plastic pretzel and what appears to be a pair of prosthetic legs.

There is no clear resolution to “Letters on the Wall”; the book does not present a thesis or find clear themes in the wall leavings. You eavesdrop on a long series of personal tragedies, and then, suddenly, it’s over.

Just like the war itself.

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Letters on the Wall by Michael Sofarelli. Harper Collins Publishers. $24.95