Gary Gordon remembers marching through the streets of Washington, D.C., with fellow veterans at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s dedication in 1982.

People were still “bitter” about the U.S. government’s portrayal of the war, and they half expected to get spit on and treated as poorly as many Vietnam veterans were in the years since they’d come home. Instead, the crowd threw flowers at them.

In 1990, he and a band of other local veterans endeavored to bring the Vietnam Traveling Memorial Wall – a smaller replica that toured the country – to Concord, where it stayed for a week as about 60,000 people from New Hampshire and around the world visited it. He and his group stood by it the entire time, guarding it with a 24/7 vigil.

Now, 35 years later, the memories came to Gordon as he entered the New Hampshire State House on Wednesday to see an exhibit honoring the moving wall’s time here and the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War.

“This all is something that I don’t try to think of, but it’s something that I can’t stop thinking of,” said Gordon, who lives in Concord. “It’s always there, and it doesn’t take much to remember.”

The small exhibit opened in the State House Hall of Flags on Wednesday and will remain there through May 26, Memorial Day. Included is a collection of letters, medals, photographs and other artifacts that visitors left at the traveling memorial in 1990. Aside from a collection at St. Paul’s School shortly after it happened, Gordon said, this is the first time these pieces have been presented to the public.

But the display, put together by the New Hampshire State Archives, is a fraction of the items left there. After the moving wall shut down, Gordon remembers spending the next week helping to catalog what he estimated were nearly 1,000 items.

What strikes him about this display, though, are the pieces that aren’t shown.

He remembers one young woman whose father’s name was on the wall. She didn’t have a piece of paper, so she pulled out her expired driver’s license and wrote on it with a magic marker: “I miss you, Dad.” She placed it on the wall.

“What more can you say?” Gordon said. “That war decimated the whole generation, in more ways than one.”

A life in service

The day the exhibit opened at the State House, a steady stream of people stopped by to look at the memorial as Gary and his wife, Gail Gordon, regaled with stories of the traveling wall and his time in service.

Gary grew up in the U.S. Army, moving all over the world with his father: He climbed the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, he ran around the Coliseum in Rome and he shook hands with the emperor of Ethiopia.

He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1967 for two reasons. The funny story, he said, is that after witnessing his dad’s career in the Army, he knew he didn’t want to march like they did, and the food was better. And, he said laughing, “I’ll be damned if I would wear a tie.”

The more truthful reason, as Gary called it, is that he followed in his dad’s footsteps and those of his dozen or so other family members who have served. He also learned something growing up in the Army.

“It’s like somebody had once told me about the butterfly effect. If a butterfly is in Africa and it flaps its wings, does it affect what happens here? Yes, it does,” Gary said. “In some way, shape or form, it affects what happens here.”

He served from 1967 to 1971 on a Navy aircraft carrier, spending 1969 in Vietnam. After his period of service, Gary worked as an EMT for 18 years and as a mental health worker at the state hospital for 21 years.

His experience led him to get involved with veterans’ advocacy and support. He spent years teaching lessons on the history of the war, and he worked with a former Concord legislator to write a bill compelling New Hampshire to follow federal law on when to raise and lower U.S. flags in memory of lives lost. Gary also became president of his local chapter of the nonprofit group Vietnam Veterans of America. That organization also put together a flag display that still stands in the State House.

His tenure as president was also when he discovered the traveling memorial. After Gary went to see it in western Massachusetts, he and more than a dozen other veterans in the organization began to raise money to bring the replica to New Hampshire, an effort that was supplemented by the state’s broadcasters’ association and the New Hampshire Union-Leader.

Once the wall came, Gary and his group camped out with it for the full week on the campus of the New Hampshire Technical Institute. They pitched a tent and brought sleeping bags, and they took turns watching over it.

Keeping the memorial open through the night was vital.

“The people who really needed this wall were like us, and they didn’t like crowds,” Gary said. “They would be the ones that would be showing up at three and four and five o’clock in the morning.”

He remembers one veteran who visited in the wee hours of the morning. It was dark and foggy out as the man placed his necklace at the memorial. The chain featured a number of religious symbols.

“He figured that if one god didn’t protect him, one of the others might,” Gary said. “That’s the way he lived for the year or so that he was in Vietnam.”

Gary’s wife, Gail, also remembers the effect the monument had on people. Some pictures show visitors kneeling by the wall.

“People did have a hard time,” she said.

After the monument packed up, Gary and the other veterans collected all the artifacts that people had left throughout the week: the driver’s license, the necklace and hundreds of others. They spent the next several days documenting each one in a photograph and writing down which panel they were left on and, if possible, the person who each item was associated with. He’d gotten permission from the state’s governor to do so, and the collection now lives in the State Archives.

Thirty-five years later, Gary said he’s glad to see it brought out into the public – even if the display represents just a sliver of his efforts. And he remembers how important it felt, even back then. 

The traveling wall was a chance to educate people and open their eyes, he said back in the day, and to help them remember what the war was like.

“It did what it was supposed to,” Gary said. “It needed to be done.”

Charlotte Matherly is the statehouse reporter for the Concord Monitor and Monadnock Ledger-Transcript in partnership with Report for America.