Memories can’t survive on their own. They live in brains, bouncing off things and slowly taking new shapes. One of Ed Tick’s vets doesn’t remember being blown up with his best friend but prays that the horrible things he dreams now, over and over, are symptomatic of the confusion of trauma and not what really happened—that it’s a story he’s telling himself, trying to make sense of the absurdity that is war.

There’s the fog of war, and there’s sometimes a different fog that follows.

Mike Brady, the retired surgeon with the cigar who said he was healed by seeing his brother’s name, doesn’t show up at all on Google. At least not in Bluemont, Virginia, or any town nearby. No retired surgeon with that name on Google, either.

The phone number he gave is a disconnected land line in Herndon. It could have been a transcription mistake. But that guy—the vet who’s not sad, who comes to the wall at peace and leaves cigars not because he’s anguished but because he’s healed, the one with the great, uplifting story—the name he gave for his brother isn’t on the wall.

Legend has it that the first object left at the wall was a Purple Heart. Many more have been left there since.
Photograph from the book Offerings at the Wall courtesy of Turner Publishing.

That doesn’t make the story untrue. Maybe something happened—maybe, fighting demons, he panicked when asked his name and gave a false one. Can it be that he has no story at all, that he’s just a rogue playing an odd trick on a credulous writer? But he was there, at the wall on Memorial Day. He had an earnest, plausible story. It can’t all be fake. There must be an explanation.

Fifty miles away, down Snickersville Turnpike in Bluemont, Rosemary draws a blank. She lives by the old train station, knows everybody in town, and her father was in Nam, but she doesn’t know Mike Brady or any retired surgeon. Neither does Scott at the post office or Lynnette or Amy at the wounded-warrior retreat for Walter Reed patients that will open next year. Lynnette shakes her head in woman-to-woman sympathy.

“He gave you a fake name and a fake number?”

Bubba and Pete at Tammy’s Diner know everybody in town—but no Mike Brady or any vet who visits his brother every year at the wall and smokes cigars.

If it’s all made up, why did he pick Bluemont, a town of 3,000 where it just happens that a retreat for wounded vets is being built? Did he have this story ready in case he got the chance to punk someone?

There’s got to be more to the story of Mike Brady. There is more, even if we’ll never know it. Mike Brady, whatever he’s about, is another artifact of the Vietnam wall.

So many of the collection’s mysteries can never be unraveled. You can research and conjecture, but you never have the story unless the donor gives it up. Felton warns that you should never impose your own meaning on the things left at the wall, but of course you do. It’s the seductive power of the collection, that an object will mean something to you without your knowing what it meant to the person who left it.

Vietnam veterans returned home to an America deeply divided and sick of talking about the war. Felton was advised not to wear his uniform in the civilian world. He was called a baby killer.

So Felton developed another kind of Vietnam wall. There are certain things that to this day he’ll discuss only with other vets. To outsiders, he might tell a story shrouded in hypotheticals, expressed in the second person and without resolution:

“Imagine it’s happened to you. You’re captured with your best friend, and he’s injured, he’s got gangrene in his leg, and if you don’t give up information, they won’t give him the penicillin. And after a while the gangrene rot starts to smell.”

You can research, ask questions, and conjecture. You can find that Duery Felton grew up in Northeast DC and attended Smothers Elementary. That at the time of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which made Vietnam a big war, Felton’s parents—as DC residents—had never been able to vote for President.

You can find in previously published works that Duery Felton Jr. volunteered for the Navy, like his father and brother, but a heart murmur disqualified him. You can find that he then enlisted in the Army. You can ask him about it, and he’ll tell you he was drafted, actually, and without hesitation tell you the address on G Street, Northwest, where the Selective Service office was.

You can find that he was awarded a Bronze Star with a V for valor for going back into a kill zone three times to rescue the wounded near the Cambodian border in 1967.

“A Viet Cong with a machine gun yelled right at me, ‘GI, you die!’ and opened up,” he told the Washington Post in 1990. “The ground around me exploded like the inside of a popcorn maker.”

Now he doesn’t want to discuss it.

Dollar bills are often left as a symbolic fulfillment of a promise. Some are torn in two—one half is left at the wall, the other kept as a remembrance.
Photograph from the book Offerings at the Wall courtesy of Turner Publishing.

You can find some references to this incident as the time and place he got his life-threatening injury, the one that would keep him at Walter Reed for years. You can find other references that it wasn’t that incident. You can guess that the latter is right.

You can read in Gail Buckley’s book American Patriots: The Story of Blacks in the Military From the Revolution to Desert Storm that he faced racism in the Army, a fact that, as Duery himself might tell you, the North Vietnamese would exploit in propaganda pamphlets that asked African-American soldiers: Why fight here when your civil-rights fight is at home?

You can find that half his face was ripped off by a tank in an accident in 1968, that he remembers the combat surgeon telling him they were trying to save his life. You can read that he spent years at Walter Reed in an atmosphere so racially tense that a skipping record of “My Girl” by the Temptations incited a discussion of the merits of music made by black people, which led to a “mini race riot,” with whites and blacks “in wheelchairs, on crutches, carrying IV bags,” all fighting. Afterward, he and his chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America pressured the government over the US military’s use of Agent Orange and helped welcome troops home from Desert Storm.

You can figure out on your own that somehow, after more than 30 surgeries and with constant pain, Duery Felton transformed himself from a broken, angry man mistrustful of authority into a government employee who bridges that divide for thousands of others. That he’s absolutely necessary to one of the most interesting jobs in Washington, a curator’s position that usually requires a graduate degree. He is a man now emotionally healthy enough to revisit Vietnam every day, every hour.

One time, he opened a Ziploc bag containing a bandana and was overwhelmed by the smell of the jungle. He’s a man who never knows if he’s going to see an object from his own unit. Who reads but doesn’t read. Who gets calls at all hours, at his home, about veterans and the collection. But you can never know how he does it or know if this job is what gave him back his peace of mind, or even kept madness at bay, if that’s a story he chooses not to tell.

It must be a hell of a story.

Rachel Manteuffel (rachel.manteuffel@gmail.com) is an actor and writer who lives in Southwest DC. Find her on Twitter @rachelman2.

This article appears in the November 2012 issue of The Washingtonian.