NORWAY – A local Vietnam veteran will honor his fellow veterans next week when he performs an original inspirational song at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Al Pelletier of Jackson Lane in Norway will sing his song, “The Wisdom That We Gained,” as what he calls the “ultimate” tribute to his 19 classmates at Brunswick High School killed in the war – a record for one community in Maine during the Vietnam War.

“It was written as kind of a healing thing for myself,” said Pelletier, who served a 30-month tour in Vietnam under the Commander 7th Fleet aboard the USS Oklahoma City and the USS Providence GLG-6 in the war room central as a radarman third class.

Pelletier will be performing on Nov. 6, the first day of the five-day event to mark the 25th anniversary of what has become known simply as The Wall. The event will include music and poetry tributes, the reading of all 58,256 names by some 2,000 volunteers and a keynote address by retired Army Gen. Colin Powell.

Pelletier’s inspiration to write the song came in 1976, while between jobs and struggling with depression. “As usual, I picked up my guitar and started strumming as a way to distract me from suicidal thought,” Pelletier wrote recently when asked to share his inspiration for the words and music. “As if a gift from God, words and music started to come to me. Within an hour I had written ‘The Wisdom That We Gained.'”

Pelletier said the song has helped him throughout the years to cope with life and understand its enormous losses and sacrifices. “I hope my song will help give inspiration and the same feeling of purpose it has given me to all who served,” he said.

Pelletier, who performed the song six times when the moving wall came to places like Sherman, Patten, Auburn and Old Orchard Beach, said the invitation to Washington, D.C., was totally unexpected. “Out of the blue, I get this letter to go down and do this,” said Pelletier of the invitation he received from 2nd District Congressman Mike Michaud.

“I was 19 when I enlisted. I came back as a bigger kid,” said Pelletier, who was honorably discharged in 1969 and became a working family man in the flooring business.

The words in his song tell his story:

“Two years in that place I came home in disgrace. Learned to understand the heartaches of a war through life we must ignore. We teenage boys were men in Vietnam.”