Viet Nam: Hush, Timmy - This Is Like a Church

The veteran and his wife had already stared hard at four particular names. Now the couple walked slowly down the incline in front of the wall, looking at rows of hundreds, thousands more, amazed at the roster of the dead. "All the names," she said quietly, sniffling in the early-spring chill. "It's unreal, how many names." He said nothing. "You have to see it to believe it," she said.

Just so. In person, close up, the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial--two skinny black granite triangles wedged onto a mound of Washington sod--is some kind of sanctum, beautiful and terrible. "We didn't plan...