EDINBORO — More than 40 years have passed, but Deborah Nichols Stranahan said she still has dreams that the high school sweetheart she married at a little church in Spartansburg is on his way home.

A U.S. Army helicopter pilot, Colin K. Nichols was killed when his helicopter was shot down by ground fire in Vietnam on July 20, 1966, leaving behind his new wife and a daughter he’d never meet. His body was returned Aug. 2 that year — his wife’s birthday — and laid to rest in Rose Hill Cemetery in their hometown. The inscription on his tombstone reads “May We Remember.”

Those words are meant “more as an admonition than a sentiment,” Stranahan told the crowd gathered Thursday near Mallory Lake at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania for the opening of a five-day exhibit of The Moving Wall, a half-scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Nichols’ is one of 58,217 names of Vietnam War dead listed on the wall. “There are 58,217 stories associated with each of those names,” Stranahan said. “My story is but one.”

Among the names listed on the 253-foot replica are more than 100 from northwestern Pennsylvania who lost their lives while serving in Vietnam, including 30 Crawford County residents.

“Every day, I am painfully aware that but for the grace of God and some lousy North Vietnamese shooters, my wife and son may have been coming here today to see my name on that wall,” said Erie County Judge Michael Dunlavey, a retired U.S. Army Reserve two-star general. “It took a long time for me the visit the (original) wall in D.C. ... I don’t know if it was the pain or the guilt of surviving when so many others did not.”

But visiting the wall, Dunlavey and others said, allows for remembrance of those killed in Vietnam and offers veterans, their families and the public at large a sense of some closure to what was the longest and arguably most controversial war in U.S. history to date.

The names and the cut-short lives they represent may also be read as a cautionary tale, according to Dunlavey. “Before we send our citizens (to war), volunteer or not, it must be for a defined purpose,” he said. “Sometimes our leadership forgets about that.”

But sociopolitical commentary is “not what we’re here for today,” Dunlavey added. “Today we’re here for remembrance.”

A stated goal of those who created the monument in Washington has been to avoid commentary on the war itself and instead allow it to be a simple memorial, uninfluenced by “pro” or “anti” ideologies, to those who served and died.

“It is with that stated intent that Ediboro University is proud to host The Moving Wall,” university President Jeremy D. Brown said.

The wall was brought to the campus through a collaboration with the Erie County Office of Veterans’ Affairs and Vietnam Combat Veterans Ltd. During the event’s initial announcement last year, Erie County Veterans’ Affairs Director John Williams said the exhibit last visited Erie County in 1995.

“I can’t tell you what this means to me — there are no words,” Williams said Thursday. “We don’t forget. ... And as we remember their sacrifices, we also mourn for what might have been. Please remember them for who they were — and who they might have become.”

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