I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again
The aesthetic characteristics of the stone out of which the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was constructed are exploited to tremendous effect by the poet. The memorial is black—which has manifold significance to this narrative—and has a haunting, mirror-like quality. Here the speaker alludes to its reflective quality through symbolic imagery when he describes himself as existing both inside and outside the memorial. Because he can see himself in the stone, it seems to pull him inside it—to have an agency of its own—akin to how his memories of the war pull him back into the past. The stone’s black surface, reflecting his own Black face, conjures up the internal conflicts of being a Black soldier in Vietnam, fighting and dying alongside white soldiers while the civil rights movement back in the United States was met with violent resistance.
I go down the 58,022 names
By citing the specific number of names on the wall at the time of the speaker’s visit, the poem locates us in a particular moment in history, over a decade after the war’s end, when the war’s toll on human lives is largely but not fully known. Year after year, new names are added as soldiers’ fates are discovered. When the memorial was unveiled in 1982, the wall featured 57,939 names. In the following decades, hundreds more names would be added. As of September 2020, there were 58,279 names. The number 58,022 is both exact and contingent; it gestures to the scale of the war's toll while suggesting that its true impact is unknown and perhaps unquantifiable.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
The semi-colon between these two clauses indicates a causal relationship between the two ideas. Without background information, one might draw the conclusion that seeing Andrew Johnson’s name among the dead reminds the speaker of how he died in “the booby trap’s white flash.” Yet from historical records, we learn that Andrew Johnson served in the 9th Division, while the author served in the Americal Division, and that Johnson died two years before the author enlisted. So the work of the semi-colon to link Johnson’s death and the author’s memory of a wartime explosion is misleading, and yet undoubtedly purposeful. How might we understand the author’s conflation of another’s soldier’s death and his memory of an explosion he survived? One of the many ways we may interpret this is in reference to the two lines just before he finds Johnson’s name, when he’s “half-expecting to find/ my own in letters like smoke.” Knowing from background information that Andrew Johnson was also a young Black soldier from the author’s hometown, we see that Johnson’s name in the poem stands in juxtaposition with the speaker’s name; Johnson’s death throws light on the speaker’s life. Perhaps the memory of “the booby trap’s white flash” is a memory of survival as much as it is a memory of violence.
A white vet's image floats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I'm a window.
The poem’s underlying concern with racism is most explicitly situated in this section, in which the reflection of a white veteran seems to look right through the Black speaker. While literally this is one of many optical illusions created by the memorial’s polished surface, where reflections overlap and flicker between clarity and distortion, these lines have an emotional logic quite separate from their physical reality. When the white vet looks “through” the speaker, the speaker feels like a “window,” and so we understand that the white vet isn’t seeing into the speaker; this isn’t a moment of intimate, piercing perception. We look through windows without seeing the glass itself. The function of a windowpane is to be an invisible buffer. The speaker’s felt invisibility and utility as a Black soldier among white soldiers in the war is evocatively conveyed in these three lines.
