We made the sign of the big snowman at the end of Groundhog Day. Maybe it was ten o'clock and it had started to rain and the temperature was sinking towards the freezing mark. The sign of the big snowman - we stood by the window and shaped a three-tiered snowman with our hands - was our prayer for snow days, for escape from school, and was far more important to me than to my sisters since they pretty much could survive the school day and I pretty much could not.

The snow did not come. It so rarely does in the climate that surrounds New York Harbor. The thermometer stuck at thirty-four and on February the third rain poured down all day, soaking us as we ran to school, trapping us inside when we should have had recess, making me even crazier than usual which brought on the wrath of the adults, soaking us once again as we ran home in the afternoon.

Thirty-six years later I have fled New York for the dull quiet of the American Midwest and snow piles outside my windows on a gray February first. And I make a decision. I turn on my computer and start looking up flights to LaGuardia. It is expensive and probably ridiculous but I have no choice. Across the globe right now American soldiers are dying in another war, for another deception, so another President can stand in front of waving flags and pretend he's a patriot. And somewhere in America tomorrow night at least one more boy will go to bed in a world where magic is possible and discover within twenty-four hours how viciously real this earth is.

I have spent February thirds in many ways. Sometimes simply at work or school. Once all day in bed with a passionate woman of very flexible moods. A number of times just with my mother, working at distraction. Occasionally at "The Wall" in Washington reaching out toward a name cut into black stone. But this year I have a different need.

He did not die on February third, of course. That is not the way things work in war. He died on a routine patrol somewhere west of Vietnam's ancient imperial capital two days earlier, from, as far as we know, a sniper's bullet. But the knock on the door came during dinner the day after Groundhog Day. With the rain pouring down and a bone-chilling wind blowing from Long Island Sound.

I book a far too expensive flight and at 6:30 in the morning of the third I leave a dramatically secured airport in Michigan and fly to my hometown. From LaGuardia, a cab takes me to lower Manhattan, leaving me near an old place of employment, hard by Ground Zero and another apocalypse. I walk the rest of the way. It is a bitter day, but that cold is part of what I need.

There are people who bring all kinds of gifts into your life. What my brother brought me was acceptance. He never once made me feel like the retard I was to everyone else. He never told me to calm down or be quiet. He never acted like I embarrassed him. He never got tired of listening to my strange stories.

The Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in New York sits on a brick plaza above the East River, surrounded by towers that channel the winds in every season. It is a long wall of glass blocks, pierced by two doorways: at once both sixties modern and vaguely Asian. On the glass blocks are carved, not names, but letters. Letters from parents and children and wives and girlfriends to American troops in Vietnam. Letters from American troops in Vietnam to parents, children, wives, and girlfriends. The wall is coated in emotion – in loss and loneliness, in love and devotion, in heroism and fear. And on this winter morning it is all mine. No one else ventures through this weather, across these bricks. No one stands near the rim and watches the harbor. No one else sees these preserved memories.

There is no letter like that in either my possession or memory. No last comments on the patriotism of war nor on its horrors. I have only a postcard stamped "Army Postal Service Saigon, January 20th, 1967." The picture on one side is the Imperial Palace at Hué. On the other side, in the deliberate, typewriter style lettering he used when writing to me, it says, “Hey Kid – This jungle is hot, but you know I’m staying cool. Don’t let the world hurt you and I won't let it hurt me. I’ll be on Guam next month and send something great. – Mike.” Of all the people in my life, he was the only one who ever changed his handwriting in the simple hope that I might find words readable.

The postcard arrived eleven days after the funeral. I found it on the floor beneath the mail slot and grabbed it and hid it so no one else would know. It has spent the decades since in whatever my most secret place is.

I reach out one more time into the wind to touch the letters carved into the glass. And I turn and walk away, leaving this haunted place deserted.

Ira Socol