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Thirty-three years after her son died rushing to the aid of a fallen Marine, Virginia Warren touched him and felt him reaching back, touching her. She knows it in her soul. She had heard that this kind of thing happened to the loved ones of others who touched the names. Now it had happened to her.

She walked past the names of others who had died, the thousands who had been caressed by so many fingertips over the years, and then she reached up and touched his name--Galen E. Warren, Panel 20E, Line 70.

"It felt like something I had to do in my lifetime and I'm glad I did it," she said. "I feel like my life is complete because I went there. I honored my son by going to The Wall and touching his name. And you know, they say when you touch The Wall, those men there touch you back, and I believe it. They touch you back. I felt it."

She is 85. Until the first week of August, she had never been to The Wall. She had never seen her son's name on it, chiseled into the granite with the 58,000 others.

Galen Warren was a Navy corpsman. He died on May 20, 1967, in Quang Tri Province near the DMZ. He was 21 years old. His mother said when he left for Vietnam, he didn't talk about dying. "When he went to Vietnam he didn't say, `I hope I don't get killed.' He said, `They need me and I hope I do a good job.' "

Shortly after he died, Virginia Warren volunteered to be a hostess at a Seattle YMCA. She says now that her motives were selfish, that benevolence may have grown out of it but in the beginning, selflessness didn't motivate her. She had her own reasons for offering her time.