Tonight at precisely 9:24, Chuck Roth of Collingdale is expected to stand at “The Wall” in Washington, D.C., and begin a somber roll call of 30 fallen comrades lost in the Vietnam War.

Among them will be his best friend, Marine Cpl. Robert Stanek, struck down by small-arms fire in Thua Thien on Feb. 4, 1968, at the age of 21.

“I loved him so much, man. When I found out he was killed, it broke my heart,” said the 59-year-old Marine, who was only 17 when he met Stanek at Camp LeJeune, N.C.

Roth is among about 2,000 volunteers slated to read the names of the 58,256 veterans killed or missing in action, inscribed in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s two polished black granite walls, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the memorial’s dedication. Included in the list are 185 Delaware County veterans who served in Vietnam between 1956 and 1975.

The reading of the names began 4 p.m. Wednesday, stopped at midnight and resumed today at 5 a.m. It is expected to continue 5 a.m. to midnight daily through Saturday.

From 11 a.m. until 4 p.m. Saturday, thousands more are expected to assemble on the National Mall between the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument for a parade sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans of America as part of the 25th anniversary salute.

First in line for the Pennsylvania delegation will be more than 40 members of Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 67 out of Delaware County, led by president George E. Brown.

“We’ll stop short of the memorial so the noise of the parade doesn’t interfere with the reading of names. It helps keep the solemnity,” noted the 64-year-old plastering contractor.

A retired Army sergeant from the Havertown section of Haverford Township, Brown served in Vietnam with A troop, 2nd Squadron, 17th Cavalry, 1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division from June 1966 to January 1968.

It wasn’t until 1989, seven years after the Nov. 13 dedication of the wall, that Brown made his first visit there with his wife, Ellen. He has visited the memorial about once a year ever since. For some Vietnam veterans with Brown on Saturday, it will be their first visit to the wall.

“This friend of mine is a Marine. I guess he could face anything but it has taken him this long to go down there. I think he has two cousins on the wall plus other people he knows,” said Brown.

He expects it to be an emotional experience, as it seems to be for most of the more than 4.4 million people annually who visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Designed by Chinese-American Maya Ying Lin of Athens, Ohio, when she was a 21-year-old senior at Yale University, her intent, she has noted, was to create “a journey from violence to serenity.”

The wall was established by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, led by wounded and decorated infantryman Jan C. Scruggs of Bowie, Md. It sits on three acres in Constitution Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial, catching the sunlight with its southern exposure.

The Vietnam memorial includes 140 panels on two polished black granite walls erected in the shape of a chevron, each 246-feetx8-inches long.

National Park Service rangers and volunteers assist visitors in finding and taking rubbings of their loved ones’ names inscribed on the wall in .53-inch high letters.

A storage facility in suburban Maryland contains more than 100,000 mementos that have been left at the wall including medals, helmets and jewelry. Flowers, photographs and hand-drawn remembrances are a common sight at the memorial, as are tear-filled eyes.

“Brought to a sharp awareness of such a loss, it is up to the individual to come to terms with this loss. For death is in the end a personal and private matter, and the area contained with this memorial is a quiet place, meant for personal reflection and private reckoning,” wrote Lin when she submitted her design — one of 1,420 — in 1981.

“I’m not really a very religious person, but for us it’s kind of a holy place — solemn, a spot of remembrance,” conceded Brown.

Media Mayor Bob McMahon, who was a platoon leader and senior advisor to three villages with the Army in Vietnam from February 1968 until February 1969, found his only visit to the wall to be powerful.

“It was difficult,” admitted the 64-year-old retired first lieutenant.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial also includes Frederick E. Hart’s The Three Servicemen, a sculpture depicting three soldiers by a flagstaff, facing the wall, which was added in 1984.

In 1993, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial by Glenna Goodacre depicting three military nurses and a wounded serviceman was added to the site to honor female veterans

In 2000, a plaque honoring post-war casualties was added to the site to honor victims of such maladies as cancer related to dioxin from the herbicide Agent Orange used in the jungles of Vietnam from 1961 to 1971, or as a result of substance abuse, suicide and other consequences of post-traumatic stress disorder.

To honor those post-war casualties, photographer Patrick Hughes of Concord has visited the memorial for “In Memory Day” held annually in the spring, as well as for other events.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, he said, helped him re-connect with his military past.

“I had had a bad experience when I first came back and I kind of shut that part of my life out. I didn’t have anything to do with it in the beginning,” said Hughes, who served with the Marines in Chu Lai, South Vietnam from January 1967 to Feb. 4, 1968.

Around 1985, when in Washington, D.C., on a sightseeing trip with his family, his three children asked him about “that big black wall.”

“That night I had trouble sleeping. I left the hotel at 5 o’clock in the morning and dawn had just started. I went down and looked around. I was kind of drawn to the statue of the three soldiers,” said Hughes.

Since then he has taken more than 100 photographs of the three soldiers, one of which he has featured on a card with the motto, “Together Forever,” inspired by Australian veterans he met on one of his trips to Washington, D.C.

He now visits the wall several times a year and, in 1993, joined Rolling Thunder, a group comprised largely of motorcyclists who advocate for prisoners of war, members of the military missing in action and other veterans.

Hughes and Brown were both on the committee that arranged for a half-sized traveling replica of the memorial, dubbed The Wall that Heals, to be on display in Market Square Memorial Park in Marcus Hook for four days in October 1999.

The 64-year-old photographer is familiar with several names on the wall, including that of Daniel Yeutter of Philadelphia, who had been in his platoon on Parris Island, S.C.

In the summer of 1967, Hughes and Jack Duchak of Upper Chichester, with whom he had entered the service on the “buddy system” in 1966, encountered Yeutter while walking down a road in their military encampment at Chu Lai.

“Daniel had been in the hospital in Chu Lai. He had already been injured twice. My understanding was if you have two Purple Hearts you could go home,” said Hughes.

Hughes had been a compositor for the Philadelphia Sunday and Evening Bulletin when he entered the service and the newspaper was sent to him sporadically while he was in Vietnam.

“I got a newspaper about a month or so after I saw (Yeutter) and it was kind of a shock. I thought I’d see him again and I saw his picture and obituary in the Philadelphia Bulletin,” said Hughes.

Brown learned of the death of one of his best Army buddies, Army Cpl. Ferdinand “Freddy” Kornick, from a fellow squadron member while serving out his last 10 months in the service with the 82nd Airborne in North Carolina.

“We used to kid each other because he was from Pittsburgh and I was from outside Philadelphia. He was in my squadron,” said Brown.

Kornick and Brown got to know one another during the approximately one year their extended tours of duty overlapped, with Brown leaving Vietnam ahead of Kornick.

“Our outfit was supposedly scouts, but we were used for the brigade as the Jack of All Trades. We did everything from convoy escort to being out in the field for ambush patrols,” said Brown.

Kornick was killed the day after his 21st birthday, Jan. 24, 1968, in Tuyen Duc, South Vietnam.

“I think it was exhaustion. They were running hard. He was a machine gunner on a jeep. He fell off,” said Brown.He regularly visits panel 35, line 23 at the wall, where he has taken several rubbings of Kornick’s name.Roth also feels like a family emissary when he visits Stanek’s name at panel 37 E, line 28. He has stayed in touch with Stanek’s father and siblings who live in Tennessee and Illinois and with Stanek’s wife, Judy, who now lives in West Palm Beach, Fla., with her husband, Ed Gurr.Roth applied to read Stanek’s name at the request of Stanek’s wife after he and his wife, Donna, accompanied Gurr and her husband on her first visit to the wall last June.The Gurrs also helped Roth research the backgrounds of the 29 other Vietnam veterans whose names he is scheduled to read at the wall tonight. “I felt so cold just reading names so I had to do research on them,” said Roth.

A retired lance corporal, Roth knew about 200 of the 2,700 Americans whose bodies he bagged during his second tour of duty in Vietnam in 1968 working Graves Registration at Dong Ha morgue. His research revealed he bagged the bodies of seven of the 30 men whose names he will read tonight.

“Thank God Bob didn’t come through my morgue,” said Roth, who didn’t learn about his best friend’s death until about a month later when he received a letter from Stanek’s wife.

Roth was only 17 and Stanek was 19 when they met at Camp LeJeune in early 1966.

“He came to my platoon. We became friends. We became like brothers, inseparable. He was an artist. He could draw and he could play the guitar. He actually showed me some chords,” said Roth

They trained together at Camp LeJeune, in the Mediterranean and in the Libyan desert.

Roth was hoping they would be deployed together to Vietnam, but in late 1966 when he learned one of them would have to go over in early 1967, he asked his administrator to send him since Stanek was getting married Dec. 17, 1966.

“I wanted him to spend some time with his wife,” said Roth.

Roth arrived in Vietnam around April 1967. Stanek followed in July. He was dead seven months later.

Roth recently revealed to Judy Gurr he sometimes feels guilty about volunteering to go to Vietnam ahead of Stanek, that maybe his friend’s name would not be on the wall if they had switched places.

“She said, ‘No, you gave me three more months with Bob,’” noted Roth.

For more than a year Roth has been a part of the Afghanistan and Iraq Outreach Program hosted by Vietnam veterans at the Marine Corps League Upper Darby Detachment 884 to help guide young veterans along the rocky road he encountered re-adapting to civilian life almost 40 years ago. He sees it as a way to pay tribute to Stanek.

“He was such a good person. This is what he would be doing. If you just live in the spirit of a friend you love and respect, it helps you go on,” said Roth.

He still has a hard time reconciling the loss of his fellow Vietnam veterans whose names appear on the wall.

Added Roth, “I’ll just do what I need to do, ‘til God takes me to be with those other guys.”