The Name He Left Off the Wall

Margaret

June told me the whole thing right there, under the wall, while the coffee went cold.

Margaret Pike was four years older than Harold. She went to nursing school in Charleston and joined the Army Nurse Corps in 1966, when the Army was begging for nurses.

She went to Vietnam in the summer of 1967. She was a first lieutenant, posted to an evacuation hospital at Long Binh, outside Saigon. She worked the surgical ward and then the intensive care ward for a full year.

Harold was over there at the same time, with an infantry outfit up north. For months the two of them wrote each other every week.

Margaret came home in the summer of 1968 and worked nights at the county hospital for thirty-one years. She never married. She lived in a little brick house on Second Street and grew tomatoes and gave most of them away.

“And nobody ever asked her to join a thing,” June said. “Back then, folks around here didn’t think of the nurses as veterans. And Margaret wasn’t the asking kind.”

When Harold started the wall in 1998, June asked him about Margaret. She remembered the conversation exactly, because it was one of only a few real fights they ever had.

“He said the wall was for the ones who were in it,” June told me. “That’s how he put it. ‘Nurses weren’t combat, June.’ And I said, ‘She saw more blood in a week than you saw in a year,’ and he went out to the garage and didn’t come back in until dark.”

Margaret died in 2015, of a stroke, at seventy-two. Harold gave the eulogy. June said it was the best speech he ever gave, and he never once mentioned Vietnam in it.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked her.

June put her small hand on my wrist. It was dry and cool, like paper.

“Because I’ve been watching him watch you for a year and a half,” she said. “And I think he’s starting to wonder if he got something wrong. And I’m too old and too married to make him look at it. But you’re not.”