The Wall part of woman’s quest to know her father

Published 11:34 pm Tuesday, November 6, 2007

Erin Dupler’s father was buried on Memorial Day of 1970. She’s in pictures from that sad day, a 2-year-old on the lap of her pretty, young mother.

David Walter Smith was 21, a crew chief on an Army helicopter, when he was killed in Vietnam on May 17, 1970. He is buried at Everett’s Cypress Lawn Memorial Park. That isn’t where Dupler, 39, feels closest to the father she can’t remember.

“I feel more connected to him at the Wall,” Dupler said Monday at her Everett home. “It’s powerful. I had no idea.”

This weekend, Dupler will be in Washington, D.C., to play a solemn role in the 25th anniversary commemoration of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A member of Sons and Daughters In Touch, a national network of loved ones of U.S. service members killed or missing in the Vietnam War, she’ll take part in a reading of the names ceremony that begins today and ends at midnight Saturday.

The ceremony is sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which supports educational programs related to the memorial and the Vietnam War.

Beginning at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Dupler will have two minutes to read 30 of the 58,256 names inscribed on the black granite memorial commonly known as the Wall. Her father’s name is on Dupler’s list. “You’re not allowed to say anything else, like ‘David Walter Smith, my father.’ That wouldn’t be right,” Dupler said.

A name can’t convey a person’s essence, and Dupler has spent much of her life on a quest to know her father. Her mother died of cancer in 1993.

Described by his daughter as a “class clown,” David Smith married his Everett High School sweetheart, Ann Reilly, shortly after graduation in 1967. She’d been a homecoming princess. The first of their friends to marry, the couple who met at a YMCA dance soon became teen parents.

Their small apartment was a hangout for buddies, even after baby Erin arrived. Dupler said her mother hoped her young husband would grow up. To demonstrate his love and prove he was ready for responsibility, Dupler said her father enlisted. “My mom had a great deal of guilt about that,” she said.

“I think that story was told in various ways all over the country,” said Dupler as she shared pictures of her parents from the mid-1960s. Now a parent herself, Dupler and her husband, Bill, have a 5-year-old daughter whose dimples are just like her grandfather’s.

This week’s trip will be Dupler’s third visit to the memorial. She went in 1993 and 1997, both times for Father’s Day. Back then, she said, “I was looking for a sense of family.”

Now, she sees the Wall with a broader perspective. “I’ve never been back to experience it with thousands of Vietnam veterans,” said Dupler, who was an eighth-grader at Everett’s Immaculate Conception School when the memorial was dedicated Nov. 13, 1982.

“Then, the whole Vietnam thing seemed so long ago. I didn’t understand the magnitude,” she said. “Now, I want to see all the vets and get a sense of my dad, and what he might have been like if he had come back.”

About 100 members of Sons and Daughters In Touch will be among nearly 2,000 volunteers reading names. They’ll include members of Congress, American Gold Star Mothers, Gold Star Wives of America, and Mike Gregoire, husband of Gov. Chris Gregoire. An Everett native, Mike Gregoire was drafted into the Army and served as a platoon leader and convoy commander in Vietnam.

Sons and Daughters In Touch is working to raise $1 for each name on the Wall to support construction of a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center at the site.

Several years ago, Dupler found a posting by her father’s name at a “virtual wall” Web site. “The gist of it was, ‘It was supposed to be me, not you. My kids all know and love you.’ It took four years, but we’ve been in contact,” Dupler said.

The man who said he’d been too ill to go on a mission the day Smith was killed has eight children, she said. “It makes my heart happy,” Dupler said. “My dad didn’t make it, but he came home.”

All these years since Vietnam, her country is again at war.

“We’ve learned that we can disagree with the policies, but we can separate the policies from the troops,” Dupler said. “I can look at the Wall with pride, honor and respect.”

Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlstein@heraldnet.com.