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Subject: A Tolling of Voices at the Wall; Bride Reads Father's Name in Recitation of
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 92 05:41:19 EST
Message-ID: <32.1992Nov9.054120@AmeriCast.com>

A Tolling of Voices at the Wall; Bride Reads Father's Name in Re-
citation of Vietnam War Dead<By Andrew Brownstein<Washington Post
Staff Writer=

Her family cried twice this weekend.

On Saturday, they shed tears as 24-year-old Lara Ann Rice, of
Alexandria, was married. On Sunday, she delayed her Grand Canyon
honeymoon so she could read one of the 58,183 names on the Wall,
the black granite memorial to those who died in the Vietnam War.

The name was Army Lt. Frank Latimer Rice Jr., her father, a Cobra
helicopter pilot who on May 2, 1970, became the first known U.S.
serviceman killed in Cambodia. Lara Ann Rice was 18 months old.

Referring to the two events this weekend, Rice said, "It was
really perfect timing. It includes him in the weekend, so that I
and everyone else can remember him at my wedding."

As she read the name yesterday, she wore her father's flight
jacket. When she left the podium, she broke into sobs and em-
braced tearful family members.

"She's just like her father - never loses her cool," said her un-
cle, Charles Mustian, of Centreville. "I've never seen her break
down like this."

The Wall does that to people.

It was 10 years ago that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was erect-
ed between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Some
veterans called it "the black hole," and Ross Perot compared it
to "a tombstone" that amounted to more an apology than a tribute.

But since then, the Wall has become the most popular memorial on
the Mall - a Rosetta stone of baby-boom America that through its
raw simplicity has translated the encrypted emotions of the bro-
ken and brokenhearted of the Vietnam era.

Yesterday began the first complete reading of the names at the
Wall. Beginning at 12:30 p.m.  with the name of Dale R. Buis, of
El Reno, Okla., the recital will continue nonstop until Wednes-
day, Veterans Day, ending with Richard Vande Geer, of Columbus,
Ohio.

Sometime in between - probably this evening - the readings will
stall at the year 1968, when thousands of U.S. servicemen were
killed during the Tet Offensive, the bloodiest period of the war.

The name of Frank Latimer Rice was not scheduled to be read until
Tuesday, but officials made special arrangements for Lara to read
her father's name on Sunday.

Like so many children of the war, Lara knew her father only from
photographs, stories from relatives and the tape recordings he
made in Vietnam - which arrived several days after he died.

Lara's relatives told her he was smart, fun-loving and lived for
baseball. A left-handed first baseman, Rice had serious prospects
in the major leagues before being drafted in 1967. As Cheryl
Rice, Lara's mother, is fond of saying, "The Army drafted him and
the Mets drafted him, but the Army won out."

Lara's family likes to tell her that she inherited his looks and
intelligence: She was valedictorian at T.C. Williams High School
in Alexandria and graduated cum laude from Princeton University.
Perhaps it is the friction between that cold stretch of granite
and the myriad memories of the onlookers that conjures timeless
emotions and inspires acts prosaic and surreal.

That is why people left items yesterday, such as a bottle of
Johnny Walker scotch and Tabasco sauce at one of the panels. It
explains the people with camouflage fatigues and patches reading
"Jane Fonda is a Commie Bitch" and the dense fog of marijuana
smoke in certain areas. It is what allows Peter Arnett, a jour-
nalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Vietnam, to
read the names of the dead along with retired Gen.  William West-
moreland, who led the U.S. military there.

When Jan Scruggs, who came up with the idea for a Vietnam memori-
al, invoked, "For every season . . .  " from Ecclesiastes - with
the coincidental sound of airplane engines roaring overhead - it
was hard not to think back to the time when young men were danc-
ing to the Byrds's rock version of that passage, before leaving
for Vietnam and becoming names on the Wall.

Paul Ortega, a Mescalero Apache medicine man, began the opening
ceremony by burning sage leaves and waving smoke on the Wall, a
blessing to help the servicemen's passage into the next world.
The ceremony was ended by Jesse L. Jackson, who recalled the
division that sparked the recent riots in Los Angeles, and said:
"At our very best, Americans move past division and heal."

Jack Smith, a reporter for ABC News, read the names yesterday of
about 165 who died in Ia Drang Valley, where, he said, "I lost
all of my buddies" in 24 hours of hand-to-hand combat with the
Viet Cong. Smith was hit by fragments from two grenades and a
mortar shell and saw "bodies piled up like cordwood."

So it was therapeutic for Smith, 20 years later, when he did some
of the first reports for ABC on the Wall. "I understood its sig-
nificance right away," he said. "That was the parade we never
got."

Army Col. Rudy Ehrenberg, of Fairfax, didn't get it at first. He
would jog every day from his office at the Pentagon across the
14th Street Bridge, but couldn't bring himself to look at the
memorial.

The 1963 graduate of West Point now compares his feelings about
the Wall to his views on the Vietnam veterans who protested the
war when they got back home. "I took it as a sign of weakness,"
he said.

After talking with other veterans, he said, he became "en-
lightened." Yesterday, he read the names of the 20 soldiers from
his 1963 class who were killed in Vietnam, and today he will read
the names of four people killed in his artillery unit during Tet.

"I understand it better now," he said. "Only when you get down to
thinking that there are 58,000 names on that wall, and that
58,000 people were lost to one cause, does the true power of the
wall hit home."<04:55 11-09C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)