The Name He Left Off the Wall

New Business

I told Harold ahead of time. That mattered to me. I was not going to ambush an old man in front of his own post.

I went to the hall on the Monday afternoon before the meeting and sat down across from him at the same folding table where he had handed me the Auxiliary form.

“Harold,” I said, “tomorrow night, under new business, I’m going to make a motion to put your sister on the wall.”

He set down his pen. He did not say anything for a while. His face did not change much, but his hands went still on the ledger.

“June told you,” he said.

“June told me,” I said. “And I went through the box. I read her Bronze Star citation. And I met a man in Gallipolis who’s alive because of her.”

Harold took off his reading glasses and folded them, and set them on the ledger very carefully.

“The wall is for combat,” he said. But it came out quieter than I think he meant it to.

“I know that’s what you’ve always said,” I told him. “I’m not here to fight with you about it. I’m just telling you so you’re not surprised. You’re the commander. You’ll run the vote. I’d like you to hear everything first.”

He did not answer. I stood up and pushed in my chair, and I left him sitting there with his hands on that ledger.

The Vote

The meeting on the second Tuesday in November had thirty-one members in it, the most Jeff had seen in ten years. Word gets around in a small town.

Tom brought Walt in at a quarter to seven, in a wheelchair, with his old First Infantry Division cap on his head. Earl Varney walked all the way to the back to shake his hand. Two old soldiers, one from the cold and one from the heat.

Harold opened the meeting the same way he always did. Gavel, pledge, prayer. He read the minutes. He went through old business. His voice was steady. He did not look toward the back of the room.

“New business,” he said.

I stood up. I had briefed convoys on roads where we knew people were waiting for us, and I was more nervous in that hall.

“Commander,” I said. “I’d like to make a motion that this post add First Lieutenant Margaret Pike, Army Nurse Corps, Vietnam, 1967 to 1968, to the wall.”

The room went so quiet I could hear the Coke machine humming in the kitchen.

I did not make a speech. I held up the photograph from Long Binh so everybody could see her. Then I read the citation out loud, the part about Tet and thirty-six hours without relief.

“I was a truck driver,” I said when I was done. “I never fired my weapon in Iraq, not once. You have had me on your honor guard for a year and a half, and nobody in this room ever asked me if I was combat. You just let me carry the rifle.”

I sat down.

Nobody moved for a second. Then Walt Hensley put both hands on the arms of his wheelchair and said, “Commander, may I speak? I’m not a member of this post.”

Harold looked at him for the first time. Something crossed his face, and I do not think Harold knew who Walt was, but I think he knew what Walt was going to say.

“Go ahead,” Harold said.

Walt told it the way he had told it in his living room. The mortar round, Tet, the men set aside to die. The Lieutenant who stopped and came back. “This one’s not done yet.” Forty-five Christmas cards.

When he finished, he looked straight at Harold.

“I’ve got two grandsons and a great-granddaughter,” Walt said. “Every one of them is alive because your sister walked back. I don’t know what combat means to you, Commander. But she was in it. She was in it up to her elbows.”