Memory
The word “memorial” is derived from the Latin word memoria, or “memory.” We go to memorials to remember what they represent, and in our absence, even in our forgetting, memorials function to preserve that memory. But the collective memory of a historical event is not the same as the memories of the individuals who lived it. Soldiers often suffer the divergence between public sentiment about the war they fought and their own experiences of it. The intermingling of private memory and the public memorial in the poem acknowledges this tension. And the ambiguity in the poem’s title, “Facing It,” embodies this multifaceted remembering: the speaker faces his own reflection and memories, as well as the memorial and what it reflects and remembers.
Reflection
Like the interplay between “memory” and “memorial,” the dual meaning of reflection as the mindful act of “reflecting” and the physical “reflection” of a face in a mirror resonates throughout the poem. The etymology of the word “reflect” helps us to understand the relationship between its two meanings: it comes from the Latin reflectere, "to bend back." Just like the light rebounding off the surface of the memorial and reflecting the speaker’s face back at him, facing the memorial returns the speaker's traumatic memories to him like an echo. The power of the memorial to solicit pensive reflection from its visitors through presenting them with their own reflection shows how entwined the two experiences of “reflecting” can be. In the way the speaker doesn’t turn away from his own reflection in the mirror, but watches how it changes with the light, we see his willingness to reflect on the war and its costs, personal and shared.
Black Veterans of the Vietnam War
The poem immediately establishes that the speaker is Black, and is subtly attentive both to visual black-white contrasts in the poem’s setting (e.g. "black granite," "black mirror, "white flash"), and the racial difference between himself and another veteran at the memorial (e.g. “my black face” and the “white vet’s image”). Through language both subtle and overt, this poem addresses the divergent experiences of Black and white soldiers in the Vietnam War. In the midst of the civil rights movement, many Black soldiers fought and died overseas for a country that denied them basic civil rights at home. This inequity is rarely acknowledged in memorials and accounts of the war. The speaker expresses his felt invisibility through the image of a white veteran looking through him as if he were a "window.”
