Roll of the Dice: The Wall

Those who work there call it “The Floor.”

It stretches as far as the eye can see across a cavernous warehouse in Landover, Maryland. The nondescript building bears a quite descript name: the National Park Service National Capital Region Museum Resource Center.

The MRC houses millions of artifacts collected throughout American history and across the American continent, from Gettysburg to Fort Vancouver. Most of the artifacts come from one very specific place, however, and the collection grows literally by the day.

The Floor is the eventual home for items left in tribute and remembrance by visitors to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, or as most call it, “The Wall.” If it was open to the public, you’d see aisle after aisle of blue boxes stacked floor to ceiling, although some items (like the motorcycle in the video below) are too large to be contained.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial collection is the only one of its kind, comprised entirely of donated items. It started organically almost as soon as the memorial opened in 1982. Long before Internet memes and social media, visitors from around the world were somehow moved en masse to leave items at the wall below the names of their loved ones.

Flowers, flags, ribbons, letters, photos, treasured belongings and mementos. Each day ended with a fresh array of tributes, and park rangers found themselves tasked to figure out what to do with them.

They established a routine: after the park closes each night, rangers collect the items left behind. Those items are transported to the MRC and placed in a box to be catalogued. In a 2016 profile on the MRC, ABC News reported that approximately 500 boxes had been catalogued to date. A thousand more sat waiting to be examined. Goodness knows how many boxes there are today.

The organic, unique collection attracted press attention from the start. In the days when USA Today commanded the highest readership of any American newspaper, the paper ran a story about the items left at The Wall, with a profile of one of the park rangers responsible for the nightly collection.

Joe Grushecky still remembers the article.

He still has it, in fact, three decades after he first read it, clipped it, and shared a copy with his friend Bruce Springsteen.

One afternoon in December 1997, Bruce and Patti added themselves to the millions who had made the pilgrimage to The Wall. They were in Washington, D.C. for the Kennedy Center Honors, where they had (as Bruce summarized when debuting the song he’d written about it years later) “an unusual experience.”

Not at The Wall itself–Bruce’s experience there was like that of most visitors. “I had a few friends from when I was a kid,” he explained, “the drummer in my first band, another fellow who was a singer in another band. We went and found their names and stood there for a while, and we looked at all the things that people bring and leave in front of the wall. All kinds of little mementos, sacred objects.”

(Although he didn’t name them that night, Bruce would bring Bart Haynes and Walter Cichon to life in later years both on stage and in print.)

It was the dinner reception that evening that Bruce found disquieting. In a room full of notables and luminaries assembled to honor Bob Dylan, Bruce found himself sitting near Robert McNamara, one of the chief architects of the war. In later interviews, Bruce recalled feeling unsettled in the proximity of the man largely responsible for the loss of so many.

Bruce remembers Joe sending him the article “a week or so later.” Joe remembers showing it to him in person the next summer when they got together for one of their periodic songwriting sessions. Both may be true, and both men were certainly inspired by the idea of an ever-growing totemic collection and its unlikely curators.

Although the session yielded such gems as “Another Thin Line” and “Code of Silence,” Joe and Bruce couldn’t quite get traction on a song about The Wall. They tried exploring a few ideas and directions but ultimately moved on to greener fields.

Neither of them abandoned the idea, however. In 2002, Joe released “On The Wall” on his Fingerprints album.

“On The Wall” is a rocker through and through, but its verses are as intimate as a spoken-word story. The second half of the song focuses on Ranger Black, the very same park ranger profiled in the USA Today article Joe saved.

In the article, the reporter asked Ranger Black if he’d ever been particularly affected by any of the items he’d collected. The article is decades out of print, and the current incarnation of USA Today doesn’t have an on-line archive of their 20th century issues. But Joe’s lyrics in “On the Wall” memorialized Ranger Black’s response.

Mr. Black works as a park ranger
Every night at 10:00 he makes all his rounds
He gathers up all the photos and the flowers
And the memories left on the ground

There was a picture that he will always remember
One that sticks in his mind the most
There were two friends so young and so handsome
So full of life they were drinking a toast

There was a picture of them in their barracks
And they were just laughing and fooling around
There’s an ID and the date on the back
Ranger Black was curious so he looked on the wall and then he found

That the names were written 
Their names were written on The Wall.

As for Bruce, he took a quieter, pensive, almost muted approach. He wrote “The Wall” in the voice of a visitor trying to make sense of his long-ago loss. While Bruce fictionalizes the name of his childhood friend, Billy is clearly a stand-in for Walter, as anyone who has read Born to Run or attended Springsteen on Broadway will recognize.

Even before his autobiography and Broadway run, however, Bruce admitted his influence in the liner notes to High Hopes, the album that houses “The Wall.”

“Walter was one of the great early Jersey Shore rockers, who along with his brother Ray (one of my early guitar mentors), led the The Motifs, a local rock band who were always a head above everybody else.  Raw, sexy and rebellious,  they were the heroes you aspired to be.

“But these were heroes you could touch, speak to, and go to with your musical inquiries.  Cool, but always accessible, they were an inspiration to me, and many young working musicians in 1960s central New Jersey.

“Though my character in ‘The Wall’ is a Marine, Walter was actually in the Army, A Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Infantry.  He was the first person I ever stood in the presence of who was filled with the mystique of the true rock star.”

Walter Cichon went missing in action on March 30, 1968.  He remains listed that way to this day.

When he debuted “The Wall” in concert in 2003, more than a decade before a studio recording surfaced, Bruce credited Joe as co-writer. “We kinda wrote this song together in some fashion.”

Joe believes Bruce was overly generous and gracious for saying so. When “The Wall” finally appeared on High Hopes eleven years later, Bruce set the record straight in the liner notes, explaining that the song’s title and premise came from Joe, but the words and music were all his.

Although he had only performed the song acoustically to that point, Bruce cut “The Wall” with the E Street Band almost immediately after writing it, and the recording that appears on the 2014 album is vintage E Street.

“What’s fascinating to me,” revealed producer Ron Aniello, “[is] I think that’s just the band playing in a room. It’s haunting. Danny [Federici] is there, too. We had a couple of guitars, but we wound up just using one.

“The way they transfer the music to digital, there’s no track sheet and you don’t know who is playing what. I didn’t know who was playing what, and I added some touches to it. But that’s the E Street Band back in the day.”

“The Wall” remained pretty much intact in its journey from stage to disc. Bruce altered a few lyrical details (a striped t-shirt instead of a black one, the day goes on instead of life, dog tags instead of high school pictures, etc.) but nothing remotely substantial enough to change the meaning or power of the song on the listener.

Cigarettes and a bottle of beer, this poem that I wrote for you
This black stone and these hard tears are all I got left now of you
I remember you in your Marine uniform laughing, laughing at your ship out party
I read Robert McNamara says he’s sorry

Your high boots and striped t-shirt, ah, Billy you looked so bad
Yeah you and your rock and roll band, you were the best thing this shit town ever had
Now the men that put you here eat with their families in rich dining halls
And apology and forgiveness got no place here at all, here at the wall

What makes “The Wall” so powerful isn’t so much the lyrics as Bruce’s delivery. His narrator is quiet, pensive, restrained. If it were a poem rather than a song, we’d perceive lines like ” I read Robert McNamara says he’s sorry” as bitterly sarcastic, and “Now the men that put you here eat with their families in rich dining halls” as indicting recrimination.

But instead, Bruce quietly ruminates, imbuing his lyrics with greater nuance than they’d otherwise have. At the end of the first verse, we feel quiet rage, aching loss, compassion for the narrator and maybe even a little for McNamara.

Apology and forgiveness got no place here at all, here at the wall. Like many of Bruce’s best songs, the essence of “The Wall” can be found in a single, powerful line. The Wall isn’t a place for forgiving or for seeking it. It’s a place for a remembering, something innately understood by its never ending procession of visitors.

Well I’m sorry I missed you last year, I couldn’t find no one to drive me
If your eyes could cut through that black stone, tell me would they recognize me
For the living time it must be served as the day goes on
Cigarettes and a bottle of beer, skin on black stone

On the ground dog tags and wreaths of flowers, with the ribbons red as the blood
Red as the blood you spilled in the Central Highlands mud
Limousines rush down Pennsylvania Avenue, rustling the leaves as they fall
And apology and forgiveness got no place here at all, here at the wall

If there’s a second line that captures the soul of “The Wall,” it’s this one: For the living time it must be served as the day goes on. The curse of remembering is never forgetting.

Life moves forward, and we move with it. The ones we lose stay behind. We visit them in our memory, where they stay forever young, and like our narrator we might wonder: would they even recognize us today?

The final verse is exquisite in its subtlety, juxtaposing the images of blood red ribbons and vivid totems laid at the base of The Wall with limos racing by, no  doubt transporting politicians oblivious to the mortal impact of their actions.

In a town where life-altering decisions are made by those far removed from consequences sits a place of profound intimacy for those who live with them forevermore.

The Wall
Recorded: Late 1990s
Released: High Hopes (2014)
First performed: February 19, 2003 (Somerville, MA)
Last performed: May 22, 2014 (Pittsburgh, PA)

Looking for your favorite Bruce song? Check our full index. New entries coming soon!