We were walking along and along the bottom where people left flowers and little notes and pictures etc. was a little metal bracelet. My mother stopped in her tracks exclaimed quietly "oh my, someone left their POW bracelet"
in a surprised, startled and sad tone.
The POW bracelets were used when someone you loved was lost in the war. You wore it until you found that person.
Apparently the owner of that bracelet finally found their loved one.
People my age were just walking past the bracelet, probably wondering what it was. But people who had lived through the Vietnamese war and who had known what the POW bracelets were, were stopping by the bracelet in an awed silence, lost of words. It's the kind of thing that will make you lose you breath, make you forget what you're about to say. The memorial itself is inspirational and tells its story... about how the war was and how large the human loss was, how people remember each other, and all the emotions and memories imbedded into the names lined up on those walls. But this little bracelet had such a large impact.
That one person got their message across without saying one word.
One final Goodbye, I love you, I care about you, I never forgot... All of the above...
Just by returning a simple item that they never lost in all those years.
A simple item, that symbolizes so much more.
"When I first saw this and understood what this bracelet was and stood for, I wanted to cry.
I can't even explain how I felt, reading the experience in words isn't even near. You'll get the idea of what I saw, but you won't get the complex emotions, the thoughts and the image of the bracelet sitting next to the wall of names, with a crowd of people just standing there. Half of us were stopped in time, thinking about this person and their life, and the person of whom the bracelet represented, while the rest of the world was moving on behind us."
