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It sits 30 minutes south of us off I-85, in a grassy bowl beside a rest stop where the trees, bushes and huge brick façade deaden the roar of interstate traffic.

Stand there, surrounded by 36 crape myrtles, and the passing trucks and cars seem so far away.

Feel the serenity of the place in the numbers chiseled in granite. Walk past the crape myrtles, decorated with frayed yellow ribbons and small American flags, and head toward the wall.

One long wall.

Six feet away, you can read them. The names. All the names, worn by weather and time.

Our war dead. North Carolina’s war dead. From Vietnam.

We lost 1,598 North Carolinians in the Vietnam War. Each was someone’s brother or sister, father or son, a close friend or a college buddy. It happened four decades ago. But for many of us, it still feels like yesterday, seared into our collective subconscious.

The N.C. Vietnam Veterans Memorial Park off Interstate 85, between Thomasville and Lexington, brings faded memories into sharp focus. It’s fitting, this brick-and-granite tribute pushed by volunteers and dedicated in 1991, on Memorial Day.

Go there today, and every name you see — on a brick, a plaque, a yellow ribbon — tells a story. So, on this long Memorial Day weekend, let’s look at three.

The organizer. The architect. The brother behind a name.

Their stories are our stories.

Let’s start with the knock at the door no one wants to hear.

February 1967, the month Calvin Cunningham lost his brother.

Cunningham already had lost his parents in a plane crash six years earlier. He was living with his aunt and uncle, getting ready for another day as a senior at Lexington High, when he heard a yell from downstairs.

“You need to go to the front door!’’ Mary, the family’s housekeeper, shouted.

“I’m not dressed!’’ he told her.

“Well, you need to come anyway!’’ she responded.

Cunningham threw on a pair of pants and a T-shirt and bounded down the stairs barefooted. He saw two soldiers at the front door.

“We have some news for you that’s not good,’’ one of the soldiers told him.

Cunningham read the 17-word telegram and saw in sparse detail how his older brother, Jay — his best friend, his protector — had died. Result of metal fragment wounds. Received in hostile ground action. Died Feb. 14.

Cunningham thought his brother was bulletproof. Jay was too tough, too mean to get killed.

“I’m the best-trained person in the world, Calvo,’’ Jay told his brother a few days before he went off to war. “And I’m not the least bit worried.’’

But here was Cunningham, in the living room of his Aunt Catherine and Uncle Mose, holding a telegram that shattered his world. A few days later, his brother would be buried in Lexington’s Forest Hills Memorial Cemetery, between his mother and father.

Jay — a graduate of Oak Ridge Military Academy, a member of the Army’s First Calvary Airborne, a boy considered the most handsome teenager in Lexington — was dead. He was buried in his uniform. He was 20.

Another knock. Another door.

June 1970, the month David Tanis lost his legs.

Tanis couldn’t contact his family. He was lying in a hospital bed, slipping in and out of consciousness after a mortar blew off his left leg below the knee and his right leg 10 inches below his zipper.

So, a taxi driver did it for him. He went to Tanis’ house near Fort Bragg, knocked on the door during dinner time and gave a telegram to Tanis’ wife, Stephanie. His son, Steve, was 3; his daughter, Collette, 8.

Collette followed her mom into the bedroom and watched her cry, her face buried in her husband’s green beret. Collette walked out. She couldn’t take it. It was too much, too soon, just three months after her dad went to war.

“What’s wrong with Mom?’’ Steve asked. “Something happened to Daddy?’’

“I don’t know,’’ Collette responded.

David Tanis was a Green Beret, a member of the Army’s Special Forces who would run into the rain of bullets to follow their tough-guy motto: to liberate the oppressed.

On June 6, 1970, Tanis found himself surrounded by bullets near a river in South Vietnam. He was 29, an infantry company commander running across a ridge when a mortar landed six inches from his right foot.

He was blown 30 feet in the air, and everything went in slow motion. When he came down, he saw his left leg mangled and his right leg in two pieces 15 feet away. His right foot was still in its boot.

He got airlifted from the war zone in a helicopter, with pieces of his right leg laying on his stretcher.

In an American medivac hospital in South Vietnam, 25 miles from the battle front, he awoke to a woman’s scream. He looked over and saw a soldier beside him in bed. The soldier had pinched a nurse with his one good hand. He only had one. His other arm and his two legs were gone.

“Hey, you’ve been sleeping for some time,’’ the soldier told Tanis.

Tanis didn’t say anything. He kept looking at the soldier’s legs. Or where they were supposed to be.

“Don’t worry about that,’’ the soldier told Tanis. “I’m the only one who survived.’’

“OK,’’ Tanis thought. “This guy can’t clap his hands, and I’m feeling sorry for me? If that’s the case, I’m not worth anything.’’

That’s all it took. David never got the soldier’s name.

Tanis needed 20 months at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington to repair his body.

He lost 80 pounds from his 6-foot-5, 215-pound frame, as well as his athletic agility that, in his freshman year at Lehigh University, allowed him to average 15 points and 20 rebounds a game as its starting center.

He learned to get around in a wheelchair. He also learned to walk again on two new prosthetic legs. And even when his daughter hid his wheelchair because she was embarrassed by her dad’s disability, he never let that get him down.

He just gave his daughter good-natured grief.

“Collette,’’ he’d say. “Are you going to hide my wheelchair again?’’

But there were no more battlefields for Tanis. He moved his family to Winston-Salem, enrolled in Wake Forest University’s School of Law and started over. He became a practicing attorney and later a judge.

That’s how he met Calvin Cunningham. He had become an attorney, too, in his hometown of Lexington. They talked about the law and their families. But they also talked about the war.

By the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan had formed the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program and began looking for people to help the nation heal and reflect on a war it had tried to forget.

Tanis, a District Court judge in Winston-Salem, was tapped and appointed president of the N.C. Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program. He led a team that decided to build a memorial for the state’s fallen soldiers in Vietnam.

He enlisted many people to help. That included Cunningham, whose family happened to be in the brick business.

Cunningham’s younger brother, Neal, ran Cunningham Brick, and Tanis figured the two brothers could help round up enough donations of money and materials.

But Tanis and his committee needed a design. They had received 75 designs, some from as far away as Michigan and Oregon. The winning design, though, came from Bob Gunn, an architect just down the road in Charlotte.

Gunn calls it a miracle. Here’s why:

Gunn was struggling through a tough marriage and the emotional fallout of being a child of alcoholic parents.

So, trying to relax one day in April 1986 , Gunn went to the campus of Davidson College, walked down a long hallway and saw a wall 100 feet long covered with notices.

Gunn noticed the tiny corner of a green flier, buried beneath sheets selling bicycles and used typewriters. He pulled it out and saw that it was a national design competition for the N.C. Vietnam Memorial.

Six years earlier, Gunn and a team of architects had submitted a design for the National Vietnam War Memorial in Washington. They lost. Gunn wanted to give it another go.

He struggled for weeks. But finally, the idea came to him in 20 minutes — a circular path, surrounded by trees, with water running over a wall of bricks.

Gunn sketched his concept in two days. And as he sketched, his 5-year-old daughter, Julia, sat in his lap and peppered him with questions.

He answered every one.

Gunn found out he won through a phone call. And that set in motion five years of raising money and reworking his design. It also set in motion the beginning of his new life.

A month after he won, Gunn started his own architectural design firm with a trusted colleague. Four years after that, he remarried and later moved to the foot of Mount Mitchell to a house beside Lake Tahoma.

It all started with his winning design. That motivated him to jump.

But what motivated him to enter the competition in the first place?

Guilt.

His draft number, according to his May 1 birth date, was 356. April 30 was No. 5; May 2 was No. 35.

Any draft number 100 and below meant one thing: You were going to Vietnam. Gunn didn’t.

But like many from his generation, Gunn knew people who did — including his old dorm adviser at Virginia Tech. His name was Bill Hawkins. He never came home.

“I got lucky,’’ Gunn, who’s 60, says now. “Bill didn’t make it.’’

Gunn no longer has his winning drawings. He gave them to Julia, now 27 and a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania.

He goes by the memorial when he’s traveling I-85. So does Tanis. He’s 68, retired to the Outer Banks, where he lives with his wife and writes novels, gardens and raises roses.

Tanis knows the committee that helped start the memorial 22 years ago is dwindling. He clicks off the names of the other organizers, talks about what they did at length and says at the end, in a soft voice, “They’re not around anymore.’’

But Calvin Cunningham is. At 61, he is still practicing law in downtown Lexington in an office that bears a smiling picture of his two grandchildren, Will Henry and Caroline, the two youngsters who call him Poppy.

And right beside that picture is a rubbing from the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington: Panel 15-E, Line 28. It bears the name Jacob H. Cunningham III.

It’s the same name at the memorial off I-85 — 85 bricks across, 11 bricks up, if you’re counting from the far right. Cunningham goes there frequently, sometimes on Memorial Day, sometimes on Feb. 14, the day of his brother’s death.

He always goes by himself. When he does, he stands in front, thinks of the present day — two wars on two fronts, in Afghanistan and Iraq — and remembers the past.

With regret.

“We commit people to overseas wars, and we talk about only losing five people in Iraq,” Cunningham said. “But that’s five families going through the same agony and misery our family went through.

“It’s a life-altering event, and you know, it never leaves you. Never. It’s always there.’’

Let’s end with that. The need to remember. The ultimate sacrifice.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com