Mike Nocito looked across a wall bearing names of Americans lost in the Vietnam War, reading to find the people he knew.
It was something he, like many other Vietnam veterans, has done before: Reading through panels of names, line by line, to find the familiar ones. When he heard volunteers were putting up a traveling half-scale replica of Washington D.C.’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Somerville Thursday morning, a day before Veterans Day, he came to do it again.
“The first time I was in Washington, I broke down. Now it’s better,” he said. “I guess time heals it.”
Nocito deployed with the Air Force to Thailand in 1969 and 1970. He was looking for the name of his friend Carleton Miller, a Melrose native who went missing in action in 1971.
“He was a Navy flyboy,” Nocito said. “He was coming back to his carrier, and he went into the South China Sea. They never recovered him.”
The wall will be up until Monday at Assembly Row’s Mass General Brigham Great Lawn, 399 Revolution Drive. Volunteers are staffing it 24 hours a day, available to help visitors find the names of their friends and loved ones.
There will also be a ceremony Friday at 11 a.m., reading the names of Somerville and Medford natives who lost their lives in the war.
An estimated 1.3 million people lost their lives in the conflict between 1965–1974, including 405,000 to 627,000 civilians from North and South Vietnam and about 282,000 U.S. and allied troops, according to political scientist Guenter Lewy, who tallied the casualties.
Vietnam veterans often felt isolated when they returned to the United States, said Ted D. Louis-Jacques, director of veterans services for the city of Somerville.
Decades later, when COVID-19 lockdowns hit in 2020, losing social supports they had found over the years was especially difficult for that generation of veterans, he said.
“It was in an unpopular war, given how many veterans came home and didn't get the welcome that they deserve for their service, for their sacrifice,” Louis-Jacques said. “The fact that we're able to honor our Vietnam veterans here locally in Somerville, especially that we’re able to bring them together after being so isolated from the COVID 19 pandemic — These are the reasons why we're just excited to have the wall here and to really share their stories.”
It took volunteers a little less than two hours to erect the travelling wall Thursday morning.
One of the volunteers, Jessica Gibson from Medford, said she was there to honor her father Kenneth B. Gibson, a Vietnam veteran who died in 2019 of prostate cancer related to Agent Orange exposure during the war.
She looked across at the wall, the long list of names each representing a full life lost, and the American flags waving nearby.
“Now that I'm looking at the overall display — a lot of names — as sad as it is, it’s a bittersweet moment,” she said. “It's just beautiful, seeing how all of these panels were put up and how everyone was out here and making a difference, and making a big impact.”
