Revisiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Ten things you may not have known about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

• 1) It is considered a memorial, not a monument. Monuments commemorate the lives of people; memorials provide closure to death and feature commemoration as a way to honor the dead. Monuments are beginnings (of praise, of eternal admiration); memorials are ends.


• 2) One of the stipulations for the competition seeking design plans for the Memorial required that the design make no political statement about the War. When Lin’s design was unveiled, many of her critics refuted its legitimacy by referring to the guidelines of the competition and claiming her design was politically loaded and derided the War.


• 3) Virginia senator and Vietnam veteran Jim Webb was a member of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and was against Maya Lin’s design. He called the memorial a “black sash of earth,” a “sad, dreary mass tomb, nihilistically commemorating death.” He said it was pathetic beside the Washington Monument, where, the obelisk “piercing the air like a bayonet, you feel uplifted.” At the time of its construction, he called the memorial a “tragedy for those who served.”


• 4) Even though the Memorial’s design allows space for individual reflection, two memorials were added after the Wall was finished in 1982 in a nod to the critics looking for a more realist memorial that could provide the kind of uplifting Jim Webb spoke about. A statue of three soldiers in action was designed by Frederick Hart and added at the Lincoln-side entrance to the memorial in 1984. To represent women’s participation in the War -- there are only a handful of women’s names on the wall -- a statue 300 feet away commemorating their contribution was added in 1993.


• 5) The 58,256 names on the wall are listed chronologically, but not simply from one end of the memorial to the other. Instead, the earliest deaths (from 1959) sit directly beside the last ones (from 1975) where the East and West portions meet in the center at the Wall’s highest point. From the center, the names go East until the wall receeds into the ground, then begin again on the West end, finishing the "circle" back at the middle. The names are also listed without military rank, placing them as members of society, not as only soldiers.


• 6) Although the Memorial begins its list of deaths in 1959, Harry G. Cramer was actually the first casualty, killed in a training action in October of 1957. His name can be found on the East wall at panel 1, line 78, which was added a year after the Wall was finished. The last listed deaths are the 18 killed in the recapture of the freighter Mayaguez on May 15, 1975.


• 7) The name of each soldier killed is preceded by a diamond, but the approximately 1,300 who remain Missing In Action are preceded by a cross, which is changed to a diamond if the remains are found. If an MIA soldier is found to be alive, the diamond is changed to a circle. There are no circles.


• 8) From certain angles, you can see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial reflected in the granite, as each arm of the Wall seems to stretch out to them.


• 9) Two veterans have shot themselves at the wall. The first, 36 year-old veteran Jeffrey Charles Davis, killed himself just four months before ex-Marine Randolph Taylor shot himself in the chest and survived on January 15, 1985. The year before, Taylor fasted for 40 days to draw attention to the plight of Vietnam veterans. Taylor later regretted attempting suicide there, saying, “I feel like I desecrated a holy place.”


• 10) As part of the nation’s memory and healing process, the Wall also serves as a kind of shrine: dog tags, letters, medals, crosses, shoes, flags, wedding rings, even a motorcycle -- personal and cultural artifacts (again serving to show the dual public/private nature of the Memorial and its affect on people) are kept and archived by the National Park Service.