In Poems and Trinkets, Emblems of a Public Mourning

A widow named Margaret left a photograph addressed to Pete
when she visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It was of a
smiling young man in a dark tuxedo -- their son.

"Here's Guy's graduation picture," she wrote in an accompanying note. "You would be so proud of him, he's such a fine young man. . . . I think I have done a pretty good job of raising him."

Someone else left behind a baby's sandal; someone else, a watch for a friend who always asked the time. Every day since the memorial opened in 1982, National Park Service rangers have gathered up the poems and Purple Hearts, the battle ribbons and dog tags and combat boots that visitors bring to the monument.

Secured in the agency's museum resource center in Landover, some of the
items were on display there yesterday as officials marked the
100,000th offering at the Wall.

Mostly anonymous, the items underscored the power of the memorial as a way for people to commemorate, communicate with and even apologize to friends and relatives who died in the Vietnam conflict. "I could've done more for you guys, I'm sorry," wrote someone in a note that accompanied a wreath made of barbed wire.

When the memorial was planned, no one foresaw this ritual developing,
said Jan C. Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. But fate was cast during the monument's construction,
when a Purple Heart was placed in concrete that had just been poured.
"That is not an urban legend," Scruggs said yesterday.

The memorial quickly became something of a shrine, he said,
and introduced a new chapter in public grieving.

"The items left at the Oklahoma City tragedy, the World Trade Center,
the AIDS quilt, even the small memorials we see each day on highways are
traced to how America changed the way it mourns," Scruggs said. "This is healthy, and it is a debt we owe to the Wall and those engraved thereon."

People who brought their treasures to the Wall left them behind to the mercy
of the elements. But the items are receiving museum-quality treatment
by the Park Service, which also takes care of 43 other collections,
from battlefields and other historic sites, at its massive warehouse.

Some of the items, such as the multicolored Harley Davidson motorcycle
donated by the Wisconsin Vietnam Veterans on Memorial Day 1995,
have toured the country....

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