And when it was over, Dave Zimmer had to put it down on paper, where at least part of the hurt could be examined in black and white.

“I was making a pilgrimage back into the Vietnam era. The night was so dark that we had to watch where we walked on the new path, through the trees to a huge dark slash in the earth – the site of the memorial.”

It was a spring evening in Washington D.C. Zimmer and the Mabel-Canton Senior Class of 1983 were arriving in darkness at the site of the new Vietnam Memorial. They were looking among the 57,000 names engraved on the marble slabs of the memorial for the name of Harold Housker, Mabel-Canton Class of 1966.

“It was a shattering sight – thousands and thousands of names were before me, above me and to the right and left. It was my generation; those names were of men my age. The emotions of everyone there were best expressed by an anonymous voice somewhere in the dark that softly said, ‘Oh my God, look at how many names there are.”

The students, using matches and small flashlights, roamed the length of the wall, searching for Housker’s name. Zimmer stood back and tried to take it all in. His mind wandered back nearly two decades, to a time young Housker was injured in football practice.

“I recalled that in practice on a fine fall afternoon, he got banged up in a scrimmage and came back to the huddle with tears in his eyes from the general hurt of it all,” recalled Zimmer, Mabel-Canton football coach. “As his coach, I hope I handled it right.”

That is just one of the fond memories Zimmer still has of the fullback with “slow Feet” who less than two years after graduation stepped on a land mine in Vietnam.

“I remember he was a lot like I was in high school: A quiet , shy farm boy, “Zimmer said, ‘It’s a small school and I’ve been here 20 years. You get to know everyone, including families.”

Coaches and athletes develop close relationships - nearly as close as those developed by men in combat platoons. “I was only 26 when he graduated at 18, “Zimmer said. “So he was of my generation.”

Zimmer said another teacher at Mabel-Canton remembered Housker as a student sitting on the steps outside the band room listening to the music. “He was one of those who enjoyed music, but never got a chance to learn to play,” Zimmer said.

“There were numerous hand-made little wreaths propped against the wall.

“I had walked past at least 30,000 names when someone’s little light illuminated a small wreath of flowers which contained an old newspaper picture of a young, smiling marine. The handwritten note attached said, “Son, We still miss you Love, Mother and Dad.”

Housker wasn’t the first or only Mabel-Canton High School grad to get shipped to that far-off war. Zimmer remembered that of the 25 members of the letter winners club in 1966, eight, including Housker, wound up fighting in Vietnam.

“At that time,” Zimmer said, “it wasn’t so much antiwar around here. There was the hope that everything would turn out all right.”

Then, the day after Thanksgiving, 1968, Cpl. Harold Housker was killed in Vietnam. “The reaction was that it finally had hit home, “ Zimmer recalled. “The war finally reached Mabel.”

Zimmer and others underwent a transformation in the way they viewed the war. “That for sure was a turning point in my thinking and in the thinking of others,” Zimmer said. The loss of Harold Housker, the quiet boy who played with pain, forced the question, “What for?”

“And we had so many other guys in Vietnam, suddenly you had to worry about them too,” said Zimmer.

Many of those men returned to Mabel and Canton bearing scars of their own. But only Harold Housker died outright.

“Then it happened quickly. Someone ran up and said, ‘Kent Snyder found Housker’s name.’ There it was, low among the names on that high wall.”

The next day, Zimmer and the students returned to the memorial to lay a wreath at the foot of the slab bearing Harold Housker’s name. While tourists snapped pictures of the impromptu memorial service, Zimmer tried to find words that would seem appropriate.

Days later, when the class returned to Mabel, the small ceremony was repeated at Housker’s grave in the Scheie Lutheran Church cemetery north of Mabel. “I was really pleased with the way the kids of today reacted and related to it,” Zimmer said.

Then Zimmer, trying to exorcize the hurt of it all much the same way Harold Housker did with tears on the practice field 17 years ago, sat down and wrote his essay. When it was complete, he took it to Clifford and Hilda Housker, Harold’s parents, at their farm home north of Mabel.

They read it and brought out pictures of Harold. Some showed the young soldier in his dress uniform, home on leave in Mabel. Others showed him in full combat gear with the craggy hills of Vietnam in the background.

One picture, Zimmer said, showed Harold and his best Army buddy, each enjoying a can of beer. Within weeks after the picture was taken, both were dead.

“That’s when I knew I had to get out of there,” Zimmer said. “I could see it starting to get to his mother.”

So he went home and wrote the final lines of his essay, borrowed from an inscription on the Vietnam Memorial itself: