[When the Bush administration invaded Iraq, I began to have frequent flashbacks to Vietnam. This was not because there’ve been no other US-made wars since then; there’ve been plenty. The flashbacks come because this one, right from the jump, felt so similar – perhaps most of all in its unavoidably prolonged devastation, its miserably predictable history. So when I began to write about war, this memoir essay was the first thing to come out.]

Last time I was in the District of Columbia, I went to the Vietnam Wall and copied down names in my notebook. I’d been there before, and what I did each time was walk along and read the names, walk along and watch the other people, listening to what they said, seeing what they did. The first time I went I read the names to myself, inside my head, like when you read a book. After that, I sometimes whispered the names, like if you move your lips when you read; sometimes I said them out loud, not real loud, but people could hear me if they were nearby. I did it on purpose, wanting to say the names out loud, wanting to hear them spoken.

That last time, without meaning or planning to, I started writing them down. I don’t know why I did this. At first I just picked out names I liked, names that made me think I could see the person. I guessed, pretended I could tell what they looked like from reading their names. Then I got the idea of having a cross-section, making groups of names like in a Hollywood war: names in Spanish, Italian and Polish, names that were apparently Jewish and Irish, names that lots of Black men have – that sort of thing. I knew I couldn’t really tell, but I did it for a while anyway. On the next memorials, of course, there’ll be more names like Sayeed and Ng, but in those days, if you use the Wall as evidence, there weren’t many on what is generally called “our side.”

I wrote down names that made me think up stories, imagine hair colors, hear dialects. Knowing I was probably wrong in my guesses and stories, I wrote the names down anyway: Blaine Pittard, Austin Teeth, Sasa Ute, Lars Olssen, Dick DeGraf, Tony Palacios.

Then I wrote down only last names for a while: Zomberg, Littlejohn, Swafford, Lacy, Boyd, Easley, Almanza, Candelaria, Junkins, Dunkenberger, LeBeau, Kidwell, Toschi, Preddy, Starkweather, Cayce, Lozano, Terhune, Cutshall, Nazarino, Bixby, Duplechain, Hertler, Shank, Shay, Marcus, Czernota, Rouska, Flournoy, Lovelace, Garside, Varner, Boots, Epperson, Bodgett, Rocha, Hipke, Martell, Clegg, Lapochonsky, Jacobson, Tolleran, Allenburg, Hoskins, Guyer, Mainardy, Pritikin, Matusek, Kinkaid. I have more, but you get the idea. All together they sound like a choral recitation, a prayer, even; we could recite them along with – or maybe as – our pledge of allegiance.

And then I wrote down only first names: Simmie, Ennis, BillyRay, Nelson, Winston, Donald, Domingo, Paschal, Pedro, Maurice, Vernon, Clayborne, Gerald, Earl, Mack, Curtis, Cyril, Amalio, Burdette, Rogelio, Clarence, Toler, Raymond, Angel, Zane, Wade, Elton, Dewey, Joel, Ivars, Reynold, Troy, Delbert, Aster, Youssef, Calvin, Terry, Noah, Quentin, Upton, Clyde, Homer, Darius. This variety thrilled me because the daily preponderance of Bob and Chuck and Tom and Richie and Juan and Jose and Roosevelt and Kwame had limited both my expectations and my imagination, despite the influence of experience.