"In the fall of 1982, a U.S. Navy officer walked up to the trench where the concrete for the foundation of The Wall was being poured. He stood over the trench for a moment, then tossed something into it and saluted. A workman asked him what he was doing. He said he was giving his dead brother's Purple Heart to The Wall. That was the first offering."

The story is told in a book about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Offerings at The Wall, released Turner Publishing Inc. The photographs in the book record some of the 30,000 objects and letters that have been placed at The Wall, as if at a shrine, by relatives and comrades of the men and women there memorialized.

These gifts of remembrance are collected each day by volunteers and preserved by the National Park Service in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection, housed in a climate-controlled repository where the mementos lie near such historic artifacts as the life mask of Abraham Lincoln.

(Five hundred of the objects are on view in an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.)

Some of the offerings were left with poems or letters (letters that were sealed will always remain so), but others bear meanings known only to those who offered them: a Bible, a fishing float, service ribbons, a sock for an amputee's stump, a popsicle stick, four mortarboard tassels, a foil wrapper from a Hershey's Kiss. In his eloquent introduction to the book, Thomas B. Allen writes that The Wall "became a place for wishes, for futures that could not be.

Tucked into a wreath are the things of an imagined life: new baby shoes for a baby who never would be, the pencils and crayons for a first day of kindergarten that never would be, champagne glasses to toast a wedding anniversary that never would be, ornaments for a Christmas tree that never would be." Someone left five cards, a royal flush for a poker game that never would be played. And a soldier left a photograph of a North Vietnamese man with a young girl, along with a note: "Dear Sir: For twenty-two years I have carried your picture in my wallet. I was only eighteen years old that day that we faced one another on that trail in Chu Lai, Vietnam. Why you did not take my life I'll never know. You stared at me for so long. . . . Forgive me for taking your life."

And the boots. So intimately shaped by those who wore them, yet so universal-the familiar black leather and tough green fabric, the lugged soles bearing the memory of the earth of the Delta or Con Thien-that they seem a symbol for the whole.