ect 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 heal-
ing process.” Some 1,421 entries were submitted,
and the competition had four criteria: The design
must be reflective and contemplative, it must be har-
monious 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 ex-
perts reviewed the submissions and, after four days
of careful deliberations, unanimously chose the de-
sign 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 submit-
ted 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 orig-
inal 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 finish-
ing 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, ap-
plauded 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 Monu-
ment or the Lincoln Memorial. On these black gran-
ite 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 cen-
ter 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.”
Further Reading
Karnow, Stanley.Vietnam: A Histor y.New York: Har-
per & 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.Jeffer-
son, 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 Me-
morial. 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 Re-
membrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. New
York: Vintage Books, 1987. Combines transcripts
of messages left at the site of the memorial with in-
terviews with those who left them there.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial: Official Park Guide. Wash-
ington, D.C.: National Park Service, U.S. Depart-
ment of the Interior, 1995. The official guide of
the National Park Service, whose job it is to over-
see 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.
Joseph Edward LeeSee also Architecture; Asian Americans; Boat peo-
ple; Cold War; Foreign policy of the United States;
Platoon; Reagan, Ronald.1024 Vietnam Veterans Memorial The Eighties in America