Speaker
The first-person narrator of this poem informs the reader in the opening line that he is a Black man. We learn he is visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. Further details confirm that he is a surviving veteran of what was at the time America’s longest-lasting and most controversial military engagement.
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson is the name of a young Black soldier with the same hometown as the author who died in 1967 in Vietnam. When the speaker recognizes Johnson’s name etched into the memorial wall, he experiences a flashback to wartime violence. From biographical details, we know that the author enlisted two years after Johnson’s death, but the poem’s conflation of Johnson’s death and the speaker’s own memory of war collapses the separate experiences of the two soldiers into one traumatic memory. Johnson’s name has another layer of resonance, too, as it may remind the reader of President Andrew Johnson, whose racist policies in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War deprived many Black Americans of their freedom.
The White Vet
The white veteran is seen only as a reflection in the memorial's polished surface. The observation that his “pale eyes look through mine” can be literally explained as the white veteran’s attention not being focused on the speaker’s reflection: he is focused on scanning the names of the dead. Metaphorically, however, this may be understood to comment on the prejudiced treatment of Black soldiers by white soldiers, during and after the Vietnam War.
Mother and Son
The wall’s brilliantly reflective surface appears for the final time in the poem’s closing image, in which "A woman’s trying to erase names:/ No, she's brushing a boy's hair." There are a number of possible interpretations for the woman trying to erase names. It could be a metaphor for wishing to bring dead soldiers back to life, or attempting to rewrite history. What punctures the illusion that she can rewrite the past is the reality of the present: her son, whose hair she's brushing. Ordinary tenderness in the present is the final image that grounds this poem.
