Memorial wall stirs emotions in La Center

Loren Sievila stood in front of the black 8-foot-tall wall and stared at the sea of names etched in white.

He knelt down before a panel containing thousands of names and pulled a black crayon from his shirt pocket. He placed a piece of paper over a row of names and dragged the crayon across. After a few strokes, the name of Jack Grandahl appeared.

Sievila recounted the day he went to the airport to see his best friend off to Vietnam. It was the last time he saw him alive.

“When you’re 19, you don’t think of dying,” Sievila said as he began to cry. “But when he waved at me, something told me I was never going to see him again. I didn’t know if I was going to get it or he was.”

A few months later, in February 1968, Sievila’s best friend from Luther L. Wright High School in Ironwood, Mich., was killed as he tried to retrieve a fallen comrade.

Sievila served during the Vietnam War as an air traffic controller on the USS Wasp. He spent much of that time “chasing Russians” across the Atlantic Ocean. He was in the Navy for three years, eight months and 21 days. Luck was the only thing that kept him out of Vietnam.

“Sometimes, I feel guilty because I had a wonderful life and he didn’t get the chance,” said Sievila, who now lives in Kalama.

Despite the emotions the memorial wall evokes, Sievila made the trip the La Center’s Holley Park on Thursday afternoon to pay his respects and say a prayer for his fallen friends.

The wall, which is an 80 percent scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., is only one piece of the American Veterans Traveling Tribute on display throughout the weekend.

A fence in the park is lined with 14 white banners bearing the names, hometowns and photos of Clark County soldiers who have died in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sandwich board signs provide the statistics of past conflicts, from the Revolutionary War to Desert Storm. Timelines for the Vietnam War and World War II are displayed on bulletin boards.

Photos of the 13 military men and women killed in the Fort Hood shooting in November 2009 are posted for visitors to see. American flags with the names of every rescuer and victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks fly in the park. And hundreds of gold dog tags with the names of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan fill five display boards.

La Center resident Cynthia Ham stood before the wall of dog tags and ran her fingers across the names of men and women she never knew.

“God’s been good to America, but what a price,” she said as she looked at the names on the tags and the 58,000 names on the Vietnam memorial wall.

Ham has visited the wall in D.C. but is still moved by the display.

“I just find this so amazing,” she said. “I came from the era where our soldiers were spit on and called baby killers. Having this is like a healing balm.”

For Donald R. Johnson, the display was an opportunity to pay respects to a man he didn’t know but with whom he shared the same name. Years ago, the Battle Ground resident found the name of another Donald R. Johnson who was killed in Vietnam during the same time he was serving in Vietnam as an Army medic.

Johnson’s friend Charlotte Stewart of Vancouver made the trip to help Johnson find and trace the name.

“I’m struggling with the wall because I look at all these names and I wonder, ‘Why?’” she said. “Why’d they all have to die?”

“I guess there’s a purpose for all things, and we just don’t always know the reason,” she added.

As the pair knelt before the wall, a row of colorful flags mounted on top of the wall flapped in the afternoon breeze.

Beneath the flags, an inscription: “The price of freedom is written on the wall.”

Marissa Harshman: 360-735-4546 or marissa.harshman@columbian.com.