Whenever I am visiting Washington, D.C., I feel a strong pull to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial near the Lincoln Memorial.

There’s something uniquely powerful about Maya Lin’s presentation of the more than 58,000 names of the dead and missing etched in a long, shiny black granite wall, reflecting the images of those passing by.

Like no other memorial I’ve seen, the memorial drives home the human cost of conflict. War takes sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, wives, husbands, friends. There are cards tucked in the panels, flowers, pictures. I’ve witnessed tears and people praying with one hand on the wall.

For me, the memorial stands as representative of all armed conflicts, including today’s frightening turn toward terrorist attack as a war “strategy.”

On my last visit to the memorial, I thought about a person whose name is on that wall, mentioned to me by Dan Vandersteen, a Calvin colleague who recently retired from his position as a Broene Center counselor.

For Dan, the war took his residence hall suitemate.

Kenneth Lee Brinks, a hard-working and faith-professing farm kid from Cadillac, Michigan—and a Calvin sophomore—enlisted in the Army on Nov. 30, 1967, and left for Vietnam about a year later.

“I spent hours with Ken, listening as he struggled with making a decision about continuing at Calvin or leaving. He knew that leaving meant enlisting,” said Vandersteen.

Brinks suffered a leg wound in combat a few months after arriving and was sent to Japan for convalescence, eventually returning to his unit.

On May 12, 1969, he was killed in action in Quang Nai Province. Brinks was 21.

The memorial has a website at which you can look up a name on the wall and leave an online comment or picture. On the site for Kenneth Lee Brinks, two comments are telling.

One is from a friend from back home who wrote that Brinks “was much older than I was, but he became very special to me as a youngster. I was just a little kid, with red hair and freckles and had a speech defect. Ken took me under his arms, and when I started school I came to know him as my protector on the school bus. He was a hero to me most of my earlier childhood days and he will never be forgotten.”

Another, from his Army unit, very simply states: “He saved my life on the Saigon River.”

Brinks never got to graduate from Calvin. His college suitemate just wants him to be remembered.

“Kenneth Lee Brinks” is etched on the black granite of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—panel 25W, row 62.

May all of the graduates of Calvin College, old and young, dedicate themselves anew “to think deeply, to act justly, and to live whole-heartedly as Christ’s agents of renewal in the world.”

And in doing so, help to bring the shalom that will prevent more names from being etched on memorial walls in all the countries on earth.