The wall (edition 1990)

A son and father visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to see the grandfather's name on the wall.

Source: Barnes and Noble
Age: 5-7

Summary:
This is a book about a small boy and his father. They travel from Washington to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The little boy and his father were looking for the boy’s grandfather’s name. The little boy meets other people who have lost loved one or was at the memorial paying their respects. The boy noticed people were leaving teddy bears among other things behind. His father and the boy left below his grandfather’s name a picture of the little boy. The boy noticed this place is a very sad place. This book is great for little boys to learn about the memorial. The boy understood about the sadness of the place.
Personal:
I compare this book to the Pearl Harbor memorial. I went there and it was the worst and saddest place I have ever been. I enjoyed going and I am glad I can say I went but the sadness of the place was overwhelming. I believe this book could be used for a history class. It let the kids understand what happens in the world and that our troops are something to be proud of and to honor.
Classroom:
1. We could read this around Veterans Day so the kids may understand a little about Veterans Day.
2. We could have them draw up the wall the boy describes in the book and have each student explain what they drew and what it means to them.

Lovely illustrations enhance the quiet, contemplative but oh-so-very-sad text. This book explores what it might feel like to be a small boy whose grandfather is only a name etched in very precise ("better than I can do") printing on a long black wall. Gorgeous imagery in the text, especially where the boy notes that he and his dad are reflected in the black mirror-like surface of the wall. It made me cry, for that little boy and for all the rest of us. ( )

I never knew my Uncle Clip, my father's youngest brother, who died eight years before I was born. But although it would probably be an overstatement to say I grew up in his shadow, there is no denying that he was a presence in my childhood home. His picture - a black and white photograph of a handsome young man, laughing, with the sun in his face - hung, framed, on my father's study wall. Beneath it, also in a frame, was an oblong piece of paper, with a pencil rubbing of his name. Long before I understood the significance of these two images, or their relationship to one another, long before I heard Uncle Clip's story, and my father's, I instinctively recognized this was a sacred space. We all of us, consciously or not, know what a shrine looks like.

I used to find it terrifying that Uncle Clip looked so much like my father, when he was young, almost as if the image on the wall were of my father, almost as if they might still, despite the passage of time, switch places, my father disappearing into that photograph. My older sisters, thinking perhaps, to frighten me briefly, and probably never dreaming that I would believe them for so long, once told me that the old tarp in our attic was actually the body bag in which Uncle Clip had been shipped home, from far-off Southeast Asia. As bizarre, grotesque (and patently absurd) as such an idea might seem now, it did not come as a surprise to me then, and I believed it for years. Just as Uncle Clip's photograph was with us, in the house, so too, I often felt, was his spirit - why not his body bag? It seemed frightening and strange, but then, so too did the war.

I can't remember when I first heard the story - perhaps all at once, perhaps in bits, as I questioned my parents - of my father's idealistic young brother: of his belief in the justness of the American cause in Vietnam, his belief that he would be fighting for democracy, and to protect the threatened South Vietnamese; of his determination to serve something greater than himself, and his desire to do his duty to the country he loved; of his enlistment in the army, despite the disapproval of his family, who all believed the war to be wrong; of his deployment to Vietnam, and the letter he wrote home, telling his mother (my grandmother) that the American people had been deceived, and that nothing was as he had expected it to be; and finally, of his death, on Good Friday, 1968. I can't remember when I learned that it was my father, and my Great Uncle Bob, who identified his returning body, because my grandparents were so heart-broken that they couldn't bear to do it; or when I discovered that there was such a thing as the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial - the Wall - from which the rubbing of Uncle Clip's name (my grandfather's name, too) was obtained, and to which my grandmother could never bring herself to go.

Suffice it to say that, long before I ever knew it existed, the Wall was a part of my life, and of the life of my family. It has a presence amongst us, and it casts a shadow. It belongs to us, like it belongs to so many other Americans, in a way that few public monuments do. Naturally, walking past the Veteran's Day display, in the children's room of my local public library this past weekend, I was arrested by the sight of this book, sitting on the shelf - arrested by that cover image, of father and son at the Wall. Almost against my will, not sure I really wanted to read it at all, I checked it out, and this morning, reluctantly, I put it in my bag, to be read on my commute. What would Eve Bunting have to say, I wondered, about the Wall? Would she understand its unique power and significance? Would she take an ideological position on the Vietnam War? Would I hate her book? Love it? Be indifferent?

I loved it, and am so glad I gave it a chance! The Wall is a beautiful story, told in a gentle and contemplative way, of a father and his young son visiting the memorial, to find the name of the father's father (and the son's grandfather), who died in Vietnam. Together, they search for his name, encountering others who have also come to visit the Wall: a grieving older couple, a veteran amputee in a wheelchair, a group of schoolgirls with flags, and (most poignant of all) a grandfather with his grandson. This last, in particular, had me tearing up, and was a deeply moving reminder of the loss experienced by the young boy, who would never know his own grandfather.

Like the Wall itself, Bunting concentrates on the grief attendant on losing a loved one in war, rather than on the politics of the war itself. This allows the reader to come to their own conclusions - although the young boy's declaration, at the end of the book, that as proud as he is of his grandfather's service to country, he would rather have had the chance to get to know him - can be read as a commentary of sorts, I suppose. The illustrations, done in somber watercolor by Ronald Himler - who has also collaborated with Bunting on titles such as Fly Away Home and A Day's Work - perfectly capture the emotional intensity of each scene, whether it be the one in which the young boy's father prays, beside the wall, or that in which the elderly couple embrace one another.

Given the way in which this book perfectly captures one of the most important aspects of the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial - that it manages to honor the fallen, without glorifying the war - I was more than a little incensed to read that one of my fellow reviewers considers it "patriotic pornography." I guess Bunting wasn't as explicitly condemnatory as this person could have wished. In addition to being a gross misreading of the story, and one of the most appallingly heartless things I have read of late, it seems to me that this fellow reviewer's comments point to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Wall is, to so many of us.

Just as I can't remember when and where I first learned the details of Uncle Clip's story, I can't remember when I learned my father's: that he was involved, as a young seminarian and minister, in the Civil Rights and anti-War movements. That he had been in the midst of his first pastorate, at a church in Kansas, when Uncle Clip died, and had been speaking out, from the pulpit, against the Vietnam War. That he had been labeled a "communist" by some (nowadays I expect it would be "terrorist"), although the career Army men in his congregation thanked him, privately, for speaking the truth that they could not. Most of all, although I cannot remember when or how I learned it, that, whatever my father's view of the war, he loved his brother with all his heart, and knew that his actions, in volunteering, came from a noble and honorable impulse, and a selfless desire to serve. That it wasn't necessary to agree with a man's decisions, or his views, to see the goodness and nobility in him, and to honor that.

I don't think, really, I could have put all that into words, as a child, or even a young(er) adult. But it was with a deep sense of recognition that I first read, a few years back, On the Slain Collegians, one of Herman Melville's Civil War poems, in which he wrote:

"Woe for the homes of the North,
And woe for the seats of the South:
All who felt life's spring in prime,
And were swept by the wind of their place and time--
All lavish hearts, on whichever side,
Of birth urbane or courage high,
Armed them for the stirring wars--
Armed them--some to die."

And then, later:

"Warred one for Right, and one for Wrong?
So be it; but they both were young--
Each grape to his cluster clung,
All their elegies are sung."

That's how I think of my Uncle Clip: as an idealistic young man who was "swept by the wind of his place and time," a young man - one amongst many - who paid a terrible price for the misguided ambitions of the powerful. I don't need to agree with the war (and I don't) to believe he was a good man, and to mourn his death. And The Wall - whether we're speaking of this book, or of The Wall itself - doesn't require me to. It doesn't require anything of me, of us, politically. What it does do is provide a space, a unique and powerful space, in which we all, regardless of our views, can mourn our loved ones, and honor the dead. Oh Maya Lin! You did a good, good thing, and a profoundly important service to your country, when you designed that wall!

Today, as I write this review, it is Veteran's Day. My father, who isn't in the best of health, has been speaking recently of seeing the Wall, one last time, before he dies. I think that I will look into going down to D.C., this spring. We'll go to the Wall, my father and I, like the two in this book, and we'll search for the name of that laughing young man, amongst the many thousands of his comrades. My father will pray for the dead, and that his brother's soul be at peace. And I? I will sing my uncle's elegy. With all my heart, will I sing it. ( )

Boy and his father visit the Vietnam War memorial wall and look for his grandfather's name. The grandfather's name is traced onto paper and they leave the boy's picture.
Ages: 4-8
Source: Pierce County Library, UP Branch