"These trees were planted last spring by soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry," he said. "Most of them are younger than the men whose names are on this wall were when they died. I asked one of them, a private from Ohio, why he had volunteered for the planting detail when there was easier duty available that weekend. He said, 'Sir, somebody planted shade for us.' I have thought about that sentence for five months. I think it is the whole reason we are here."
"My father, Staff Sergeant Miguel Ortiz, came home from Vietnam in 1968 because Sergeant James Harris decided, under fire, in a place none of us can picture the way they pictured it, that his platoon was coming out. Twelve men did not. My father carried that arithmetic for the rest of his life. He carried it proudly and he carried it painfully, and those two things were never separate for him. He told me once that Sergeant Harris never once, in fifty years of friendship, let him say thank you without changing the subject to fishing." A small, real laugh went through the chairs. "He said gratitude embarrassed Jim Harris more than enemy fire did. I believe him. I have known the Sergeant Major my whole life, and I can confirm the condition is hereditary in reverse β he passed the embarrassment on to nobody, but he kept all of it himself."
"This wall does not correct the arithmetic," Daniel said. "Nothing does. What it does is put the names where the arithmetic belongs β not in the private memory of the men who survived, where it gets heavier every year as there are fewer of them to carry it, but here, in the open, in the shade, on ground held by the battalion they served. From today, the post carries it too. From today, a private from Ohio who has never heard of the Ia Drang or the Michelin rubber plantation or any of the places these men fought will walk through this grove on his way to the mess hall, and he will slow down, because men slow down where names are written in stone, and he will read one. That is not a small thing. That is, in the long run, the only thing that has ever worked."
He turned then, slightly, toward James. "Sergeant Major Harris, my father's friend, my family's friend β the battalion thanks you for letting us do this while you are here to see it done. We know you would have preferred we waited until you were safely out of earshot. We were not willing to risk it."
Chaplain Ruth Abramowitz was a lieutenant colonel with gray hair cut close and a voice that carried without the microphone, though she used it anyway out of consideration for the older families in the back rows. She did not pray the kind of prayer that pretends grief has been resolved. James had heard that kind at funerals after the war, well-meant prayers that tied everything up in the space of two minutes, and he had distrusted them ever since, the way you distrust a map that shows no swamps where you know swamps are.
"We are not here to say that these deaths made sense," she said. "Sense is a thing the living try to build afterward, and sometimes we build it well and sometimes we just build it. We are here to say that these lives made a difference, which is a different and truer sentence. We are here to say their names in the presence of people who loved them, and to ask God β who has heard these names in private prayers for fifty-seven years β to hear them once more, out loud, together, in the daylight."
"Amen," said two hundred people, unevenly, the way real amens always are.
Then two soldiers stepped to the wall and took hold of the canvas, and the honor detail came to attention, and Noah's face went very still, and Daniel gave a small nod, and the cover came away and folded down like a sheet being drawn back from a bed made with great care.
The names were read by Daniel and Chaplain Abramowitz in turn, alternating, and after each name a small bell sounded once from beside the flagpole. Nineteen. Twenty. Twenty-four. The ages were read too, because Daniel had insisted and James, after one sleepless night, had agreed β a name alone can become abstract, an age cannot. Private First Class Danny Whitaker, nineteen. Corporal Henry Okafor, twenty-one. First Lieutenant Paul Mercer, twenty-four. The bell, and the bell, and the bell. Somewhere behind James a woman made a sound that she immediately tried to take back, and the woman beside her put an arm around her shoulders with the speed of long practice, and nobody turned around, because turning around would have made it an event, and it was not an event, it was a sister.
When the last name had been read and the last bell had faded into the oaks, Daniel looked at James and did not announce him with any flourish. He simply said, "Sergeant Major Harris has agreed to say a few words. He made me promise 'few' would be enforced. I have lied to a superior officer about this, and I am prepared to live with it."