BISBEE, Ariz (KGUN9-TV) - There's a special Memorial Day remembrance set up in the town of Bisbee.
It has to power to touch hearts and minds still feeling the effect of the Vietnam War.
Veterans came to Bisbee’s Vista Park to look for the names of lost friends on a traveling version of the Vietnam Memorial Wall.
The names engraved on the wall are cut deep into hearts and minds too.
58,175 names of service men and women killed in the Vietnam War listed in the order they died. Now friends they left behind search for the names that match their memories.
Ross Miller spent a career as an Army helicopter pilot. He was surprised when he did not go to Vietnam, but many of his friends did--and some did not come back.
He was looking for his friend Anthony Dal Pazzo--and found him.
Miller says, “It was a big relief or release, but it kind of adds reality to it so…”
KGUN9 reporter Craig Smith asked: “What did you think when you knew you had this opportunity?”
Miller: “As soon as I knew my whole schedule was built around it. I'd been to DC to the Wall and I couldn't find it and since he was killed late in the war, 1973, some of them hadn't been added yet."
Marion Faulkner says his friend Army Captain Charles Barnes was about to leave Vietnam and go home when he took over a mission for a pilot too ill to fly. That was the mission that led to the name on the wall he looked for, and found.
Faulkner says, “It's an honor to be able to see and touch and know that he is remembered and all of them are remembered."
Bringing this wall of remembrance to people who can't bring themselves to the Vietnam Wall in Washington is the new mission Thomas Twigg took on after his own service. He has friends and two cousins among the names he has carried across the country.
"It's giving back to my brothers that we've lost over there; the ones that didn't return. Also something for my wife and I to give to our brothers in the VA Hospitals because this is small enough to be displayed inside;and we've had them in several of the VA Hospitals, Phoenix being one of them, wheeled down in their beds so they could touch the panels their buddies are on and say their goodbyes and get some closure."
The traveling Wall will stand in Bisbee, at Vista Park through the afternoon of Memorial Day, to remember the losses of a faraway war still close to the minds of the veterans who lived it.
