What a Father Built

I want to tell you this one carefully, because it is true in every particular and it does not need any help from me.

On the twenty-second of May, nineteen sixty-eight, at a place in Vietnam called Con Thien — just below the demilitarized zone, in country the Marines had been fighting over for a year — a patrol walked into an ambush. Sixteen men were killed. One of them was a first lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps named Victor David Westphall the Third. His family called him David. He was the eldest son of Victor and Jeanne Westphall, and they lived out here in New Mexico.

Now. There is no way to make that part of the story better, and I am not going to try. What I want to tell you about is what happened next in that house.

The Westphalls got the news. And after a while — after whatever those weeks were like, which I will not pretend to be able to describe — Jeanne said something to her husband.

There was money. When a serviceman is killed, his life insurance is paid to his family. It is the one cold transaction at the end of it: the government's arithmetic on what a young man was worth. And Jeanne Westphall looked at her son's life insurance money and said: let's build something with it.

Not a headstone. Not a plaque. A chapel. On the hillside above this valley, where anybody driving this road could see it.

And Victor Westphall — who was a builder by trade — went and built it. It went up in nineteen seventy-one. Curved white walls like a sail, or like hands, depending on how you look at it, standing up off that ridge with the whole Moreno Valley below and the Sangre de Cristo behind.

They called it the Peace and Brotherhood Chapel. And they made it for David AND for the fifteen men who died with him — which tells you a good deal about the kind of people they were. It could very easily have been a monument to one boy. They would not have it that way.

Here is the part that gets me.

There was no government money in it. There was no state money in it. There was no official recognition, no committee, no ceremony, no help. In nineteen seventy-one, this country did not want to talk about Vietnam. The war was still going. The men coming home were being spat at in airports, and the national mood was that the whole business was best not discussed.

And in the middle of all that, two grieving parents in New Mexico used their dead son's insurance money to build, with their own hands and at their own expense, a memorial to the men who died in that war.

The Wall in Washington — the black granite one that everybody knows, with the fifty-eight thousand names — did not go up until nineteen eighty-two. Eleven years later.

Eleven years. This hillside was first.

Victor Westphall spent the rest of his life out here looking after it. He gave interviews, he raised money, he greeted veterans who came up that hill, and there were a great many of them — men who had been told for years that their war was not to be spoken of, arriving at a chapel in New Mexico built by somebody's dad, and finding that somebody had been waiting for them the whole time.

It is a state park now. It got official at last. And the state of New Mexico looks after it properly, through its Department of Veterans Services.

But it started as one family's refusal to let it be nobody's business.

If you have got the time, take the turn and go up. Walk in. You don't need to be a veteran and you don't need to have an opinion about that war. Just go and stand in a room that two people built for their boy, and for the fifteen men who were beside him.

I'll be quiet for a while.