There they were. My friends. My comrades. Their names carved into a 493-foot long, polished black granite, V-shaped memorial to a lost cause. I remembered their faces, our conversations, the battles won and lost in the war. I was back there with them in my mind until I felt a squeeze on my seventy-nine-year-old hand. I was with my nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Chloe Zerga, a college sophomore majoring in history. She was especially interested in the Vietnam War and had asked me to take her there.

            “It's magnificent isn't it, Grandpa? The Wall?"
It wasn't a question really, but I nodded and squeezed her hand.
"It's such a simple design, but it takes your breath away."

            “Yes, I've been here several times over the years, and it continues to have a profound impact on me." 
"You served in the Army with several of the men listed here, didn't you?"
She knew the answer, but I didn't mind that she was humoring an old man, inviting me to talk. "Yes, but one in particular stands out to me. Roger Robichaud. I only knew him briefly, but we formed a strong bond.”

            “Do you remember where he is on this Wall?”
            “Well. he died in 1965 and the names are listed by year of death, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find him.”

We slowly made our way down the Wall, Chloe reaching out periodically to trace a name with her fingers. When we drew close, we scanned the granite surface. Chloe, crouching down, said, “Here he is. Can you tell me about him?”

I nodded, needing a moment before I could speak. "I know a lot about him and his ancestry. The story, however, is quite long. Are you sure you want to hear it?"

She rolled her eyes. "Are you kidding me? Of course, I do. But if it's long, we should get out of this heat. The humidity is killing me."

"Let’s go back to that ice cream shop we passed on the way here. You're right. I can feel the sweat trickling down my back. We’ll be much more comfortable in that air-conditioned shop.”

            On the way, Chloe said, "How did you meet your friend, Roger Robichaud?”

            “We met in jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia.”

            “Jump school? Is that where the Army trains its paratroopers?”

            “Yes. Roger and I were there at the same time, in January 1964. We were the only two in the class with French-Canadian names, so we became friends since neither of us knew anyone else. He was from Louisiana, and I was from New Hampshire. We were both eighteen years old."
"That's young. He died in 1965, just the next year. That's so sad."

                        “Yes, there are over 58,000 sad stories on that Wall.”

She didn't ask me anything else until we reached the ice cream shop. I was grateful for the silence as the memories filled my mind with images, emotions, words, and regrets. Chloe and I ordered our favorite treats and sat down at a table with comfortable chairs.

            "When I arrived at Fort Benning, what do you think I saw?”

            “I don't know. What, Grandpa?”

            “Thousands of robins all over Fort Benning! I finally knew exactly where many of them went in the winter. Roger told me Louisiana was the same—very few in the summer but thousands in the winter. That was my first time in the South, and I was fascinated with the differences.”

                        “But what I saw was nothing compared to Jump school. It was only three weeks long. Roger and I had no trouble learning all the skills that the instructors made us repeat over and over again: the parachute landing fall (PLF), assuming a fetal position and counting to four as we exited the aircraft, and more pushups than I'd done in my life. The first week was spent almost entirely on learning the PLF. Unlike what you see on TV with sky divers, we were forbidden from landing standing up. We had to hit the ground lightly with our feet, shift our bodies to one side, go into a roll and then come up standing. ‘Hit, shift and rotate,’ the instructors kept repeating."

“We soon mastered all the required skills and successfully made our five jumps from a Hercules C-130 aircraft. That probably means little to you, but that airplane was a big part of my life. It was then, and continues to be today, the major workhorse of the Air Force. It can land and take off on relatively short runways carrying significant payloads. And it can carry forty paratroopers."

“We graduated and waited for orders telling us where we would next be assigned. There were one hundred of us in our graduating class. They posted the orders on the bulletin board for ninety-seven of us. All ninety-seven were going to Okinawa to join the 173^rd Airborne Brigade. Roger was one of the ninety-seven, but not me. They left the next day. I was upset. I wanted to go with my buddy Roger, but here I was stuck in the barracks with two other graduates that I didn’t know.”

            “Wow! Why weren’t you on that list, Grandpa?”

            “You'd never guess. I didn’t find out for several months. Orders assigning me to an airborne unit in Germany finally came down. I don’t know where the other two guys went. I jotted down Roger’s new unit from his orders and wrote to him after I got to Germany. He was in Okinawa for less than a year and then his entire battalion was shipped to Vietnam. He was killed in mid-1965 when the vehicle he was riding in set off a large mine in the road. He was twenty years old.”

            “That’s only one year older than I am now.” Chloe’s eyes got big.

            “It is,” I said, nodding. I took another scoop of my ice cream, trying to think of a way to lighten the mood. “Did I tell you Roger and I were both Acadians?”

            “No, what’s that?”

            “Well, long ago, in the northeast of America, there was a land called Acadia. Roger and I both have ancestors traced back to that specific land.”

             “So, that makes me Acadian?"

            “Yes, you are part Acadian. Want to hear about them?”

            “Yes, I've never heard of Acadians. I've read American history from the Jamestown colonists and Pilgrims of Massachusetts through modern times. Not once have I read the word Acadian anywhere."
"I'm not surprised. The English-speaking authorities at the time - both American and British were not especially proud of what happened to the Acadians."

“The story begins a very long time ago, in France.”