By Rita McInerney

Woodruff Park in downtown Atlanta is most often a place for music and laughter. But from April 14 to 20 the laughter and music were muted by poignant memories and tears as parents, widows, friends and veterans came to the Moving Wall to recall the sorrow of the Vietnam era.

The “Wall” is a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The replica, designed and built by John Devitt, Gerry Haver and Norris Shears of the Vietnam Combat Veterans Ltd., San Jose, Calif., is a traveling memorial to the 58,022 Americans, 1,580 of them from Georgia, who sacrificed their lives in an unpopular war from 1959 until 1975.

It has come to be generally accepted that the dedication of the memorial in Washington on Veterans Day, 1982, began a time of national healing over Vietnam. Many of the veterans who came with tears and tokens of war to place before the Wall were still tormented by nightmares of civilian massacres, napalm bombings, the Tet offensive. Now they are beginning to heal, to understand they were not to blame. The public, at the wall, feels the sadness and looks at the survivors with compassion and respect.

The men from Vietnam often came home to rejection, to epithets, to indifference and neglect from their country and its people. Over the years, wounds of the spirit festered, marriages suffered and children both loved and feared fathers who could be warm and loving, then angry and violent when something, a word or an event, triggered flashbacks to ‘Nam.

Then the memorial near the Lincoln Memorial was opened to the public. Designed by a young woman architectural student. Maya Lin, it had been ridiculed by traditionalist as a “Black Hole.” But this polished black granite wall was a catalyst to breaking down some of the barriers between the war-scarred veterans and the American public. It became a magnet in a town full of statues and monuments.

So the Moving Wall was a magnet in Atlanta last week. People came in the cool April sunshine to look and linger. Veterans, wearing well-tailored business or military uniforms, workmen’s clothes, blue jeans or the illmatched castoffs of the homeless. Parents showing the effect of grief and years, widows, and once-heartbroken fiancées searched the wall, left roses, photos, small flags.

Veterans from Vietnam and World War II served as volunteer counselors and manned the busy information booth where people came endlessly to find out how to locate a name on the Wall. “Dennis,” a 39-year-old Viet veteran, helped a mother with the daughter never seen by the man behind the name on the wall; a grandmother carrying a toddler who will never know the fun of having a grandfather, teenagers who looked at all the names and asked “For what?”

“Dennis” spent about 60 hours helping as a counselor last week. The times he felt closest to the four buddies whose names are on the wall were those still hours between 1 and 6 a.m. when silent men sat huddled against the cold; reflecting, praying. People, he said, were coming “out of the woodwork from all over the southeast, to take part in the vigil.”

He was a college student in New England when faced with the choice of serving his country or evading the draft. Being a Catholic of Irish-Polish background he made the choice to serve.

He served 12 months in Vietnam as a member of a high-risk infantry battalion and came home with wounds, lasting impressions of the horrors of combat, and mourning the loss of four close friends. It took him about 37 hours to get from “the jungle of Vietnam to the jungle of New York City.” Riding up the elevator of the Port Authority Building, still wearing his uniform, he was spat upon and called “baby killer” by a group of college students. When he got home he put away his uniform.

The next years were good ones. He finished college and took his business administration expertise to the office of a major television network. His wife was off on her own career climb. They lived in Princeton Junction, N.J., and were an advance model for the Yuppies. Gradually, his life began a downward slide. His job demanded travel, there was a divorce, and a period of alcoholism. Through it all he could voice his own omissions in the confessional, but he didn’t have anyone who could understand his mental anguish over Vietnam.

He says his first visit to the Vietnam monument in Washington was the beginning of his healing. And his upward climb got a big boost last week. Now working as a printer, he took time off from his job and was on duty at the Wall day and night. It was, he says, “the healthiest week of my life.”

He found strength and comfort in the coming together at the Moving Wall of the veterans, black and white, Marta drivers, mailmen, bankers and lawyers from the tall buildings around the park. And a lot of Vietnam battles were rehashed in the hospitality suite in the Westin Peachtree Plaza sponsored by the Metro Atlanta Chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America. “We all lie a lot,” he confesses with a grin.

“I didn’t go into the jungle, but we had to deal with the results of war. In emergency triage you have to decide who must be treated immediately and who can’t be saved. They were put off to the side. One of us would stay with them, so we had to deal with the dying as well as the wounded. We had to keep all our emotions in, nurses can’t cry.”

Lily Adams lived in San Francisco after returning from duty as an Army nurse with the 12^th Evacuation Hospital in Vietnam. When firecrackers heralded the Chinese New Year she felt like she was back in the war zone.

She knows a lot more about post traumatic stress now. But she didn’t know anything about it for several years after Vietnam.

After she came home she did a lot of crying, had nightmares, couldn’t sleep at night, was depressed and had numerous physical problems.

In 1973 her twin sons died at birth, victims of her toxemia pregnancy. Another son was born in 1979 without nerve cells in 50 percent of his intestines. There is a link, she believes, to Agent Orange in her own physical condition, the death of her twins, and her other son’s condition which required surgery and had lingering aftereffects. Her daughter, born between the boys, is fine. Both her daughter and her husband are sensitive to and supportive of her, Lily says gratefully.

In 1980, Lily and Jim Adams and their children moved from San Francisco to Hawaii where their home was under the flight path of helicopters. The frequent sound overhead of the engine triggered a flashback in her. “I found myself out in the street, waiting for the copter to land with the injured. I burned the dinner one night and realized I had to do something.”

She finally talked to a counselor at a veterans’ center. “He understands me, he’s on my side,” she told her husband in amazement after she spilled her memories. Then working on her master’s in psychology she began to “dig into post traumatic stress information.” Husband Jim read some of it and told her, “They describe you to a T.”

Now the family lives in Roswell and Lily is a psychotherapist at the Community Counseling Center in Atlanta. She is also co-founder and active member of the local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans. Last week she served as a volunteer counselor at the Wall.

She has seen the original in Washington several times and each time is overwhelmed. Now her dream is to see the statue of a nurse complete the monument triangle (see accompanying box). A model of the figure was on view last week in the veterans’ hospitality suite. One night someone gave $100 to the nurses’ statue fund with the remark, “I forget to say thank you to my nurse,” she says. “It happens all the time. One veteran dropped his disability check into the nurse’s helmet the day the model was unveiled in Washington. They really want to see her by the Wall.”

Roger Thurmond had a parade, band and banners when he came home to Clarkesville in a wheelchair from Vietnam by the way of the Philadelphia Naval Hospital in 1966. On June 10 of that year he was injured by a land mine. He became a casualty two hours before he was scheduled to leave for home. The land mine that wounded him was American, stolen from a South Vietnamese base by the enemy Communists from North Vietnam.

Evacuated to a hospital in DaNang, he had his left leg amputated. After his arrival at the Philadelphia hospital, his right leg had to be removed. He was hospitalized there from June until November, 1966, then discharged to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Decatur.

A Clarkesville native, Roger had enlisted in the Marines at 20. He was sent to Vietnam in January, 1965.

He met his future wife Marie, a Red Cross volunteer at the Philadelphia hospital where he shared a ward with “40 other guys. Some were worse off than I was, some were better.”

Roger and Marie were married in September, 1967, at St. Joseph’s church in Collingdale, Pa. Then they came to Clarkesville to begin their life together. Roger went to Piedmont College in Demorest on the G.I. bill, graduating with a major in history in 1974. After graduation he taught in the Habersham County schools and now teaches world history to tenth graders and is Key Club advisor at White county High School in Cleveland.

He and Marie have four children; Tom, 17 and a high school senior; Lisa, 15; Kevin, 14, and Mark, 11. With three of them in the band, they are active Band Booster parents.

Along with his teaching duties at school he also coaches football, boys and girls basketball and girls softball at the junior varsity level. For himself, he used to play wheel chair basketball, but is too busy now. His day, he says stretches from 7 a.m. when he leaves the house until anywhere from 7 to 10 p.m. when he returns.

On the evening he spoke by telephone with the Georgia Bulletin, teenagers’ voices were heard in the background. It was the meeting of the youth at his parish church, St. Mark’s in Clarkesville, he explained. He and Marie serve as youth directors.

His life, he says, is “dedicated to education and working with youth.”

While his luck ran out at the 11^th hour in Vietnam, he is grateful for having the good fortune to belong to the North Georgia mountain area. When he came home, he said, “People showed me they cared about me. There was a lot of support. That saved me.” There is affection and pride in his voice as he speaks of his hometown and the people there. He knows that being welcomed back home with so much love was not experienced by many other Vietnam veterans, especially those from large cities.

As for the government, he has no complaints; “It’s taken care of me.” He has learned to tolerate the “paperwork, red tape and delays of the bureaucracy.” He receives 100 percent disability and says he probably wouldn’t have gone to college if it hadn’t been for the G.I. bill. “The government helped me above and beyond what I expected.” He realizes other veterans have had difficult times getting the government to recognize their problems. He keeps informed about what’s happening to them through his membership in the Disabled American Veterans.

Described as a ‘super guy’ by those who know him, he explains his achievements succinctly: “My faith helped a lot and my wife helped a lot. She always pointed out to me that sympathy is between self-pity and suicide in the dictionary.”

Don Tortorella, a Navy veteran, served aboard a guided missile destroyer. “Our mission was to stop supplies from getting into South Vietnam from the north. They were sending small craft, as small as rowboats. Our job was to destroy them.” Only once, Don says, was his destroyer fired upon and that was in waters off the demilitarized zone. One seaman was injured by the flak.

He has no bitterness about the six years he spent in the Navy in the 1960s, just a belief that the government “has never acknowledged, as far as I can tell never assumed responsibility for its actions in Vietnam.” He doesn’t see where the government is doing enough on the Agent Orange problem and mental health ills suffered by many veterans.

He visited the Moving Wall last week with his friend, Rod Elliott. He says he was touched by the sight of all the names. He looked for one name, a friend from his school days in New Jersey who went off to Vietnam about the same time as he did. They lost contact. “His name was not on the list,” Don says.

“I have no animosity toward anyone. I don’t believe in murder, war is murder. I don’t believe in killing someone because they don’t believe something you do. That philosophy should have gone out with Pilgrimism.”

His friend, Rod Elliott, says “it’s unfortunate that individuals in government make decisions without knowing all the facts.” In particular with Agent Orange he believes officials "denied its existence before they had the real facts.”

In Vietnam he served as an electronics technician at a Vietnamese base about 90 miles south of Saigon. His job was to assist the Vietnamese personnel maintain their equipment.

“I was not out in the field with a rifle. I have no bad memories, only good. It affected me to see a different culture. I appreciate better what we have here. Before I took it for granted. Even our poorest are wealthy by comparison.”

He volunteered for the Air Force because he had a brother who was a medic in the Navy an “I wanted to see the situation for myself.” During the student upheavals, he says, he sometimes agreed with the rioters. When he got to his post in Vietnam he found some Vietnamese wanted the Americans to go home, others welcomed them. He remembers one Vietnamese friend, father of five children, who wanted desperately to get to Hawaii, U.S. He still wonders whatever happened to him.

Rod came home without physical scars or bitterness. He admits he was “one of the very fortunate. I had nothing but positive experiences.” He believes “war is such a futile endeavor. But I realize there are time for military action. Sometimes it’s the only reaction the other side will understand.”

Each day the Moving Wall was in Woodruff Park, thousands of hands reached out to trace the one name among the 58,000 forever connected by bonds of love. Others drawn to the Wall had no name to find. But facing their own reflections in the shiny black surface, they realized that they were connected to all the dead of Vietnam.