The Names

11.11.02 | 9:53 PM ET

We showed up at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. after the ceremonies had finished. It was hot and sunny, somber and quiet. Bob Dole had left, CNN was shooting b-roll. The show was over. A sizeable crowd remained amid a sea of flowers and personal memorials. It was Memorial Day.

My friends and I took it all with the same view we had of every other stop on our East Coast backpack tour: quiet, wiseass cynicism. Granted, it was a stretch for us to be cynical in this place at this time, but we managed. We dropped a few Bob Dole jokes, took a few funny pictures, and mercilessly made fun of each other. We were bored twenty-somethings having a good time on paid vacations from our first jobs out of college. Living that kind of laid-back, paid-for life can make it difficult to take anything too seriously. Sarcastic humor was our way of interacting with the world.

There’s a book by the wall that lists all of the soldier’s names alphabetically. I have a common name—Michael Thomas Murphy—and, just messing around, I searched for my name like I would in any other directory. It didn’t take long. Bingo. Two Michael Thomas Murphys died in Vietnam. One of them, a guy from San Antonio, was 19 when he died in 1968.

I’m sure we weren’t related—Murphy is a common name and no one in my family is from Texas. I grew up in Detroit, which is just about as unlike Texas as you can get. Nevertheless, I was shaken. I started to make fun of myself for feeling that way, but I found myself walking over to the wall, looking through the names, and finding mine. When I saw my name engraved in stone, one dead man amongst thousands, in that place on that day, I couldn’t stop the chills down my spine. I wasn’t very useful at 19. I played a lot of video games, had long hair, and skipped a lot of college classes. This guy went to southeast Asia, and didn’t make it back in time to hit 20. I found myself fresh out of wisecracks.

My friend Bonefacio De La Rosa took a turn at the book. Bonefacio looked up his surname and found what could have been a relative’s name, a Jesus De La Rosa. Jesus De La Rosa grew up in San Antonio, where Bonefacio’s family came from, and was born around the time Bonefacio’s father was born.

Michael Thomas Murphy, Jesus De La Rosa. Here were two soldiers with a dubious familial connection to us, but we decided to take etchings of their names anyway, as a keepsake. It?s part of the custom: Visitors make pencil etchings of names on the wall in memory of the dead.

We were working on the De La Rosa etching when a veteran approached us. There were hundreds of guys like him there that day, wearing army uniforms and somber faces.

This man asked, “Were you related to him? Jesus De La Rosa?”

We didn’t know.

“I was there,” he said. “I served with him.”

We didn’t say anything.

“Twenty-six of us died that day,” he said. “Jones…De La Rosa…” he listed off a few more names, and stopped.

“It lasted all day,” he said, far away. “It was a hell of a firefight.”

He snapped out of it, came back from wherever he went, and looked at us. I wonder now how my friends and I looked to him.  Were we respectful young adults, or dumb kids who knew nothing of war outside of textbooks and Newsweek? I don’t think I want to know the answer.

“I came to see my friends,” he said, his voice disintegrating. “I gotta touch ‘em.”

He sagged forward, crying, and ran his hand across the black granite.

“Gotta touch ‘em.”

Science fiction author Harlan Ellison once wrote that writers take tours in other people’s lives. It’s the same for travelers, I think. Our brief tour sent our usual veneer of sarcastic cynicism crashing down. We had nothing to say or do except face the gravity and reality of our surroundings. We looked again at the names on the wall, the offerings at its base and watched in respectful silence.  The veteran walked away, down the wall, visiting his friends. We never did get his name.

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved