Word: wheeler
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...Wheeler wisely cast actors strong on the comic aspect. John Bottoms moves smoothly from Roy Orbison raptures to sputtering outrage to weary depression; he can't quite bring off the tender pathos written into the script, but few could do any better. Stehlin turns a stock soap opera part (the idealistic male ingenue) into a combination of Matthew Broderick and Woody Allen acting out a Roy Rogers fantasy; he suffers worst from the capricious plotting, and can't expand his stage presence into a full three dimensions...
Just so. In person, close up, the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial--two skinny black granite triangles wedged onto a mound of Washington sod--is some kind of sanctum, beautiful and terrible. "We didn't plan that," says John Wheeler, chairman of the veterans' group that raised the money and built it. "I had a picture of seven-year-olds throwing a Frisbee around on the grass in front. But it's treated as a spiritual place." When Wheeler's colleague Jan Scruggs decided there ought to be a monument, he had only vague notions of what it might be like...
...grand. To them, the low-slung black wall would send the same old defeatist, elitist messages that had lost the war in the '60s and then stigmatized the veterans in the '70s. "Creating the memorial triggered a lot of old angers and rage among vets about the war," recalls Wheeler, a captain in Viet Nam and now a Yale-trained Government lawyer. "It got white...
...veterans, the memorial was a touchstone from the beginning, and the 1982 dedication ceremony a delayed national embrace. "The actual act of being at the memorial is healing for the guy or woman who went to Viet Nam," says Wheeler, who visits at least monthly. "It has to do with the felt presence of comrades." He pauses. "I always look at Tommy Hayes' name. Tommy's up on panel 50 east, line 29." Hayes, Wheeler's West Point pal, was killed 17 years ago this month. "I know guys," Wheeler says, "who are still waiting to go, whose wives have...
Probably no one is more determined than Wheeler to see the memorial's face made perfect, for he savors the startlingly faithful reflections the walls give off: he loves seeing the crowds of visitors looking simultaneously at the names and themselves. "Look!" he said the other day, gesturing at panel 4 ; east. "You see that plane taking off? You see the blue sky? No one expected that...