I started to write the first names from some with the last names from others, wondering what this might say about who Americans are, as a people, if we are a people. But then I thought that would be disrespectful, so I stopped. I did not want to disrespect those dead men and boys, or the people who come to visit their names. They come to the Wall as if to a grave, to visit the person whose name they’re looking for; and so did I, in a way. I was visiting them too, thinking about who they were, remembering how I saw them on television every night for years, at six o’clock and ten o’clock; every night their lives were on tv and we all watched. We saw them running through fire. We saw them cleaning their rifles, taking showers behind khaki curtains in the jungle, being loaded onto helicopters in stretchers; we saw them smoking cigarettes. We saw them killing small communists dressed in black. Sometimes we saw them beat people up, saw them smoke dope instead of Kools. Like Yossarian, whose made-up story got very popular during that war, they all knew somebody was trying to kill them.

My brothers, my husband and friends were the ones who would go or not, sign up or be drafted, get a deferment or a good lottery number, cross the border, lie to doctors, scream out in the streets of drifting tear gas. I was a high school teacher then and knew that some of my guys would go, would kill people, would die. Our school had tracks, like a lot of them do, and I taught all the tracks. I taught Honors classes every year, and sometimes Regular, and I liked those well enough, but I asked for what was called Basic. The kids in Basic called it Dumb Track. Except for my friend Janie and me, teachers pretty much didn’t want Basic. Janie and I thought the kids in there were smart, because they were. The boys who took apart cars and motorcycles sometimes planned to work for the phone company; the girls who wore thick mascara and ratted up their hair often worked the checkout at Family Foods. The girls and boys of Basic knew that more of them would go to Southeast Asia than kids from other tracks. They knew how the system works.

In December of 1969, my husband was still betting on his seriously bad eyesight and flat feet; my younger brother was making jokes about psychiatrists, and my older brother’s wife was pregnant. At school, we’d had three teach-ins organized by kids who feared the lottery as the end of their college deferments, while some of my Basic boys figured the lottery might keep them from going. Others had already gone. Why not get it over with? Lloyd Jenkins asked rhetorically at the next graduation, when I startled at the news that he was leaving in two days.