Wall Magic

It’s often easy to slip up and wish someone a “Happy Memorial Day” — it is, after all, the first long weekend of warm weather and a time for family and friends to get together. Beyond the time off, though, is the solemn reason for the holiday: As the Veterans of Foreign Wars put it just a few days ago, “Memorial Day is, at its core, a day of remembrance for those who made the ultimate sacrifice in service to our nation.” It’s a celebration, but one that should be filled with gratitude.

This year on the South Fork, there was a bold reminder of the reason for the holiday, with the appearance of the replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A slightly smaller-scale version of the black granite wall in Washington, D.C., which was unveiled in 1982, visited the American Legion in Amagansett over the weekend. It’s a traveling monument that creates a little piece of hallowed ground in towns big and small across the United States, giving veterans and families the chance to experience what the memorial offers.

The New York Times wrote about the original memorial this week, noting that this Memorial Day comes 50 years after the Vietnam War’s end. The story notes the details — more than 58,000 names of men and women who died in combat between 1958 and 1975 in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos — but also speaks of its special place among the many tributes to the veterans of many wars in the nation’s capital: “The memorial is a place of unexplainable power, many who visit say, and volunteer guides often speak of it as ‘Wall magic.’”

Indeed, the public has interacted with “the Wall,” designed by Maya Lin when she was just a 21-year-old undergraduate at Yale University, in a way that’s different from other memorials. Its stone is stark but reflective, and in addition to the traditional way of honoring people listed, by leaving flowers or items of significance, many people find it powerful to simply touch recognizable names carved into the stone, or to make rubbings of them. These men and women, lost to the savagery of war, have a permanence carved into that granite, and the names, listed in order of their deaths, are like portals that transport people across time and space to connect with their mourned loved ones.

Having this replica of “the Wall” in our midst this holiday weekend was a not-so-gentle reminder of the solemnity that sometimes is lost amid the cookouts and parties of Memorial Day weekend. On Monday, the late-spring sun beamed down on residents and visitors alike, giving those celebrations a perfect day, but also glinted off the replica Wall in Amagansett, warming its cool surface, reminding us all of the beating heart of Memorial Day, and the brave sacrifices we all benefit from.