The Wall of the Vietnam War Memorial in the gloaming with flags, photos, and mementos left daily by visitors.
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On
March 26, 1982 a groundbreaking ceremony
was held for the hugely controversial
Vietnam War Memorial in Washington,
D.C. Less than eight months later on
November 13 it opened with recriminations still swirling around it.
The
idea for a memorial sprang from Jan
Scruggs, who had served as a corporal
in the 199th Light Infantry Brigade
and was attending college in Washington studying counseling and hoping to help
the notoriously troubled veterans of an unpopular
war. He felt that a national
memorial honor the Vietnam War dead would help with the healing. Scruggs conceived of the project as one that would
inscribe the names of all of the American
dead in conflicts in Southeast Asia.
The memorial was the brain child of Jan Scruggs who served as a corporal in the wat and was a student studying to help veterans when he began his campaign to make it a reality.
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Congress refused to fund
the project because it would “clutter up the National Mall,” and because there were no similar monuments to World War II or Korean veterans. Some anti-war Democrats opposed “glorifying” the conflict, while some conservatives were loath to honor “the
first American soldiers to lose a war.”
Undeterred,
with $2,800 of his own money Scruggs began raising
funds for the project. His effort touched a national nerve and with
astonishing speed more than $8,000,000 was raised, almost all of it from private donors, many from veterans
themselves. He overcame objections and received
permission from Congress to build a memorial in Constitution Gardens, just off the National Mall near the Lincoln Memorial.
As
the money began to pour in a competition
was held for the design of the monument.
The conditions were that it have room for the names of all of the war
dead and that it have a low unobtrusive
profile—a nod to a group of voracious
opponents of the project—preservationists
who loudly complained that it would destroy
the esthetics of the Mall. Many of
the most distinguished sculptors, architects, and artists in the country submitted drawings.
To
almost everyone’s surprise the winner of the competition was Maya Lin, then a 21 year old undergraduate at Yale. Her conception was stunning
in its simplicity—and in its dramatic rejection of the
conventional forms of a monument or memorial. She envisioned a “gash in the earth” to represent the wound of loss of all of those soldiers. The entire monument was be below ground level—an
elongated shallow v made up of two black granite walls tapering from
10.1 feet high where they meet eight inches at their ends. One end would represent the beginning of the conflict and first
deaths in 1959 and the other end the last
of the combat deaths in Southeast Asia—the Marines who died in the rescue
of the SS Mayaguez from the Khmer Rouge in 1975. The two
walls would meet at the deepest point
of the war, which turned out to be May of 1968 when casualties were at their peak.
Names without rank, service, home town, or any other
identifier would be inscribed in chronological
order along the two walls.
The below ground level "gash" represented the national wound in need of healing.
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Although praised by art and architecture critics,
the design created a firestorm of bitter
opposition. Veterans’ groups were incensed calling it a “black gash
of shame.” H.
Ross Perot, the Texas millionaire and
the future Virginia Senator Jim Webb,
then a highly regarded Assistant
Secretary of Defense in the Reagan
Administration, both early public supporters of the project, now denounced it and tried to prevent the construction as envisioned
by Lin. Perot openly voiced contempt for
Lin because she was Asian and many
veterans did not want anything to do with, “that Gook.” Congress held hearings where Lin had to defend
herself under very hostile questioning. Secretary of the Interior James Watt tried to derail the project
by withholding the necessary construction
permits.
Organizers of the project, however, stood by Lin
and her vision. As a compromise they did
agree to add a representational statue
and a flag pole to one side of the
monument. The bronze Three Soldiers by sculptor Frederick Hart was installed in 1985, three
years after Lin’s memorial opened. In
1993 another representational statue of three
female figures tending the wounded by sculptor Glenna Goodacre was added nearby as the Vietnam Women’s Memorial—the first war memorial for women from any
war.
To allay the criticism of traditionalist a representational statue of Three Soldiers was placed near the Memorial three years after its dedication. A Vietnam Women's Memorial statue as added latter.
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When
The Wall, as the Monument came to be
known, opened it had 58,175 entries. Since then more than 200 more names have been
added. About thirty names turned out to
belong to still living soldiers, a
mistake attributed to clerical error
at the Department of Defense, which
provided the names of the war dead.
Thousands
of veterans marched to the site of the Memorial on the day of its
dedication. After the ceremonies, they
were as awed and moved as almost everyone else who has
ever seen it. The controversy over the
design was soon washed away with the tears of veterans and their loved ones,
who found an emotional connection
that almost no one anticipated.
A huge crowd made up mostly of veterans and their families attended the Memorial dedication ceremony.
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Spontaneously,
people began to make rubbings of the names of their loved ones and to leave
gifts for the dead. These items ranged from photographs, to packs of
cigarette and bottles of beer,
each representing something. At first
the National Park Service was unsure
of how to deal with these offerings.
Eventually they were gathered daily
and stored in an enormous warehouse.
The items are now preserved and cataloged by date. Exhibitions
display samples from the collection.
More
than two million visitors view the Wall annually, making it one of the most
popular attractions in Washington. In
2007 it was ranked tenth on the List of
America's Favorite Architecture by the American
Institute of Architects.
Several
quarter-size cardboard models of the
Wall tour the country continuously bringing something of the experience to
those who cannot get to the Capital.
Maya Lyn received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2016 in honor of her body of work including the Vietnam Memorial and the United States Civil Rights Museum.
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Lyn
has gone on to become a famous architect and designer. Her many honors include the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded
by Barack Obama in 2016. Among her
other projects is the United States
Civil Rights Museum in Montgomery,
Alabama.
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