“Dear Stuart Woodman: It’s been a long time. Here are some glasses for you. I broke yours at my place so many years ago.”
That handwritten letter accompanied a pair of spectacles left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall this year. Woodman, a corporal, died of malaria in May 1970 at age 26.
The memorial’s power is in its austere simplicity: 58,318 Americans’ names etched in black granite, listed chronologically by death date. The memorial, which received 3.6 million visitors last year, was dedicated 40 years ago this month: November 13, 1982.
Almost immediately after the wall opened to the public, visitors began leaving mementos at its base. Loved ones of deceased service members place items with personal meaning on the ground in front of the soldiers’ names. These objects range in size from ribbons, dog tags, and photographs to a motorcycle and even a Huey helicopter door.
By 1984, this tradition became so widespread that the National Park Service began collecting the items in a storage facility. Today, the collection is cataloged and maintained entirely by Janet Folkerts.
One person?
“It’s impossible, honestly,” admits Folkerts. She estimates that the backlog would take decades to catalog on her own. “I’ve been trying in recent years to get even just one more museum tech who could catalog things with me.” (The NPS didn’t respond to requests for comment on why this is.)
Folkerts says one of her most memorable items in the collection is a group of about a dozen letters left in 2016 or 2017, written by Army Specialist James (Jim) Malcolm Arbuthnot, addressed to someone who appears to be his girlfriend. The letters span from his time in basic training, to shipping out to Vietnam, through his first month on the ground. Two-and-a-half months into his tour of duty, he was killed at age 19. “After reading them, I felt like I knew this guy,” says Folkerts.
After graduating from the University of Maryland with a degree in archaeology and history, Folkerts landed a post-graduate internship cataloging items for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial collection in 2010. In 2020, she ascended to her current role, museum curator for the National Mall and Memorial Parks. Her job also encompasses the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument, and Jefferson Memorial, but those sites’ collections are largely unchanging, primarily comprising historical objects.
The Vietnam collection, on the other hand, grows every single day. As of press time, it comprises 129,950 objects that have already been cataloged, mostly before Folkerts arrived, plus a 77,612-object backlog.
If not for a rules change, those numbers could have been far more daunting. By 2015, overwhelmed, NPS adopted a new policy, thanks to which it no longer collects literally everything left at the wall. As an example,
Folkerts cites hundreds of identical patches left over the decades representing the same squadron; archiving all of them wouldn’t be a significant contribution to the collection.
Folkerts comes from a military family but has no personal connections to Vietnam.
“I get this question a lot: What do I know? Why am I the caretaker of the collection?” Folkerts says. “But I care because people should care, in general. It should be the next generation who takes up the mantle of remembering these people whose names are on the wall.”
This story originally ran in our November issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to our monthly magazine.
