All the friends from Flight School tried to get Jimmy to go see the Wall. He didn't want to go. For years he declined. He'd get close to it, get up there, he'd go by it, but he couldn't walk in there. On Memorial Day 1978 during a private ten-year flight school reunion, Scott read a passage about the Wall from Mya Lin, the architect. "Only when you can feel the pain, can you accept the death and begin to heal."
Six pilots and their wives took the pilgrimage to the Vietnam Memorial and Jimmy gave in. Scott's home, tucked into the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, provided a reunion respite, but the group took the trip to D.C. on the first day, Memorial Day, so there'd be nothing left to dread. Each pilot had a list of the names he wanted to find. Each found their own faces mirrored in their buddies' names, knowing it might have been the other way around. They laid mementos at the base of the powerful slab: a flight school Green Hat with aviator wings, a worn class photograph and roster, a green T-shirt picturing a silhouette of helicopters in formation that read '1968 US Army Aviation Ten-Year Reunion.' Everyone in the group wore the identical T-shirt and the pilots, no longer fresh-faced in their faded Green Hats, fingered the names of their friends on the black granite. Jimmy wore a three-piece business suit in all respect and admiration. He found all five men that died in his helicopter. No one held back tears.
The last evening of their reunion, the group lazed on Scott's porch leafing through old photo albums, watching the sunset. I brought out a copy of Life magazine dated June 27, 1969. Life published not only the names of the American soldiers who died during the week that included Memorial Day, but the pictures of all two hundred and forty-two men who arrived home in bodybags. Eleven pages of young American eyes, looking as earnest and hopeful as in a high-school yearbook. The faces said it all, but I read the brief article aloud, "...when the nation continues week after week to be numbered by a three-digit statistic which is translated to direct anguish in hundreds of homes all over the country, we must pause to look into the faces."
Scott gazed out over the rolling Blue Ridge Mountains and spoke softly from memory, "And since they were not the ones dead, the American people turned back to their affairs."
