Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Identification U.S. war monument

Creators Envisioned by Jan Scruggs and designed by Maya Ying Lin

Date Built in 1982

Place National Mall, Washington, D.C.

Millions of people from around the globe would visit the black granite memorial etched with the names of more than fifty-eight thousand American military personnel who lost their lives in the Vietnam War.

The painful wounds inflicted on the United States by its longest war were still fresh in 1979, when Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs and his wife, after viewing the movie The Deer Hunter (1979), decided to launch an effort to honor Scruggs’s fallen comrades. Only four years had passed since the collapse of South Vietnam and the fall of Saigon. Scruggs once said of his own service in that divisive conflict:

The bitterness I feel when I remember carrying the lifeless bodies of close friends through the mire of Vietnam will probably never subside. I still wonder if anything can be found to bring any purpose to all the suffering and death.

The Memorial

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was conceived by Scruggs and fellow veterans to serve as a permanent tribute to the U.S. dead and as a means for the country to reflect on the war in all its dimensions. Scruggs founded an organization, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, but it got off to a shaky start, initially raising only $144.50 and becoming a subject of ridicule, even from mainstream media. Undeterred, Scruggs enlisted the support of national leaders such as U.S. senator John Warner of Virginia, who donated $5,000 of his own money and helped raise $50,000 more. Donations, large and small, began to pour in from 275,000 people, and the memorial fund ballooned to $8.4 million. Private money would fulfill Scruggs’s dream of explaining the conflict to many who were not personally involved in Southeast Asia.

Scruggs lobbied Congress for a suitably prominent location on the National Mall for a memorial that would serve as a site of healing and reflection, as well as become a tangible tribute to all who were touched by the conflict. Two acres near the Lincoln Memorial were reserved for the monument, and on July 1, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation authorizing that location for the construction of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. For the next two years, Scruggs and his organization monitored the design and construction of the memorial.

A national design competition, judged by a panel of architects and artists, commenced after the project received its presidential approval. Bob Doubek, Scruggs’s fellow Vietnam veteran and a member of the founding organization, explained, “The hope is that the creation of the memorial will begin a healing process.” Some 1,421 entries were submitted, and the competition had four criteria: The design must be reflective and contemplative, it must be harmonious with the site, it must be inscribed with the names of the dead and the missing, and it must make no political statement about war. The panel of experts reviewed the submissions and, after four days of careful deliberations, unanimously chose the design offered by a Chinese American Yale University undergraduate architecture student, Maya Ying Lin.

Lin was only twenty-one years of age and had led a life untouched by death. Her entry had been submitted as a course requirement. She saw her challenge as enormous, but she methodically set out to create a memorial that was faithful to the competition’s original guidelines. Visiting the site, Lin commented,

I thought about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. The idea occurred to me there on the site. I had an impulse to cut open the earth. The grass would grow back, but the cut would remain.

Inspired, Lin returned to Yale and placed the finishing touches on the design, completing it in only three weeks.

Public reaction to Lin’s design was mixed. Race interjected itself into the discussion because of Lin’s ethnicity. Some veterans likened the black granite memorial to an ugly scar. Others, however, applauded the memorial, with its simple listing of the dead and missing, row after row. The wall’s construction phase continued from 1981 to 1982. The memorial was built into the earth, below ground level, with two panels arranged as giant arms pointing to either the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial. On these black granite panels were etched the names of more than fifty-eight thousand men and women, some of whom remained missing. The first casualty had occurred in 1956 and the last had taken place in 1975. The names were ordered chronologically, so at first—in the section corresponding to the war’s early years—only a few appeared. As a visitor walked farther into the memorial, longer and longer lists of the dead would accumulate. Such visitors, as Lin envisioned, would walk toward the monument’s vortex, the center where the two arms meet in a warm embrace. There, they would search for the names of friends, relatives, and unknown heroes of America’s longest war. From the first day, the memorial drew people bearing gifts for the dead and paper upon which to trace names of the fallen.

Impact

The memorial, dedicated on Veteran’s Day in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan, put a human face on a conflict that brought pain to so many people. The inscription on the memorial’s plaque proudly honors “the courage, sacrifice and devotion to duty and country of its Vietnam veterans.”

Bibliography

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Harper & Row, 1983. History of the war that includes mention of the memorial and its function in post-war healing.

Lee, J. Edward, and H. C. “Toby” Haynsworth. Nixon, Ford, and the Abandonment of South Vietnam. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002. History that focuses on the failure of civilian leadership to bring the war to a successful conclusion.

Library of Congress, U.S. American Treasures of the Library of Congress: Vietnam Veterans Memorial. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/trm022.html. Official government Web site that documents the monument’s construction and meaning.

Palmer, Laura. Shrapnel in the Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Combines transcripts of messages left at the site of the memorial with interviews with those who left them there.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Official Park Guide. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1995. The official guide of the National Park Service, whose job it is to oversee the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, and Barry Schwartz. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Commemorating a Difficult Past.” The American Journal of Sociology 97 (1991): 376-420. Examines they pyschological and sociological effects and implications of the memorial.