Some morning around the last Monday in May, John Leonard Jr. will put on a plain sports shirt and a pair of faded jeans and go to the western end of the National Mall to quietly visit some friends he has not seen for over 30 years.

He will not wear his Army uniform that he proudly wears as a command sergeant major because these friends were Marines, as he was, and because he does not wish to rob "Red" Belknap and his other friends of the respect he believes they deserve. It is his way.

He reluctantly wore his uniform to be photographed for this story because he did not want to be the center of attention.

John Leonard Jr., the command sergeant major for the Army National Guard in Washington, D.C., will join thousands of others who will pay their Memorial Day tributes to the people who died or were declared missing a lifetime ago in Southeast Asia and whose names have been cut into The Wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Even though he has visited those friends many times before, he will again wonder why their names are on that black granite wall and why his is not. That, too, is his way. It is the same for many veterans who visit and weep at The Wall.

"I was never any better a Marine than they were. I have often wondered why I was spared and why they were not," reflected the man from coastal Maine on a glorious Thursday in early April when the cherry blossoms were in full pink bloom in Washington, D.C.

Leonard certainly came close. He has two Purple Hearts, and he carries a small piece of mortar shrapnel in his thigh from his 14 months in Vietnam -- May 1966 to July 1967 -- when he was 19 and then 20. He was a corporal and a crew chief on a Sikorsky UH-34 helicopter, call sign Yankee Romeo 4, in HMM 161.

The HMM stands for Helicopter Marine Medium. It defines that squadron’s mission of re-supplying grunts on the ground, carrying others into combat, and flying the wounded and the dead to more peaceful places. It was the only Marine aviation squadron north of Da Nang at that time, Leonard explained.

"It was a dangerous business during a dangerous time," said Leonard of 1966 and ‘67 that, according to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s web site, yielded 17,297 American service members to The Wall.

He knows where to find his friends. Cpl. Ronald Lee Belknap, panel 9E, line 110; Pvt. Arthur Willie Greene, panel 14E, line 56; Cpl. Charlie Lee Burney, panel 22E, line 60.

They were young enlisted men who grew old beyond their years in combat, like Leonard, and who died while they were in the flower of their youth.

That is the sad truth of The Wall. Of its 58,209 names, 32,710 belong to kids who were E-3s and E-4s. Another 1,205 were junior warrant officers. Another 4,220 were lieutenants and captains. The Wall belongs to the young.

Leonard also knows how some of those young men died during the war that has come to define his military career and his generation.

-- "Red" Belknap perished after a single enemy machine-gun bullet hit him in the head on Aug. 8, 1966. He was 22.

-- Charlie Burney died after his helicopter landed for refueling and caught fire on June 25, 1967. He was 19.

-- Arthur Greene perished with four others when his helicopter was hit in midair by a friendly artillery round on Jan. 20, 1967. He was 24.

Those and many more stories about the ecstasies and agonies of combat have been recounted in Marion Sturkey’s book "Bonnie-Sue: A Marine Corps Helicopter Squadron in Vietnam" (Heritage Press International, 1996).

They are burned into John Leonard’s memory.

So is the fate of another name on The Wall.

Navy Engineman 2nd Class Joseph Musetti Jr. has been listed as missing in action, and presumed dead, since Sept. 28, 1967, when his river patrol boat came under attack. He came from Hall Quarry, Maine, near Leonard’s home of Southwest Harbor on Mount Desert Island. Leonard carries Musetti’s MIA bracelet to this day.

Belknap, however, strikes the most despondent chord.

"Pinochle was his game. He would play for hours," Leonard recalled. "And he talked a lot about his wife and his two stepchildren back in Tennessee. He was soft-spoken, and everybody knew him because he worked in maintenance.

"There was always sadness when someone died. But there was a great deal of sadness when Red died. He would have gone home in another week."

There are aspects of that and every war that do not make sense.

"The ones who stick out are the ones who didn’t have to be where they were when they were killed," said Leonard of the clerks and maintenance people who volunteered to fly combat missions because they were, foremost, Marines.

Red Belknap did not have to be flying in that helicopter.

Since returning from Vietnam, John Leonard Jr. has earned a business degree from Husson College in Bangor, Maine; raised two daughters with his wife Sharon; gone to war again, in the Persian Gulf, with the Maine Army Guard’s 286th Supply and Service Battalion; and become Maine’s state command sergeant major.

He moved to Washington as the Army National Guard’s top enlisted man in January 1997.

He has never publicly questioned this country’s policies pertaining to Vietnam.

But sometime around the fifth Monday in May, when America will observe Memorial Day with barbecues and with speeches about those who have paid the supreme sacrifice, John Leonard Jr. will spend a few minutes at The Wall remembering his friends. He will wonder why he has been allowed to live for 52 productive years while they were not.

Why? It is his way.