Vietnam Veterans Memorial | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

The National Vietnam Veterans Memorial (NVVM), located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., has three components: a 500-foot long black granite wall of names designed by Maya Lin and dedicated in 1982; a bronze sculpture of three Vietnam-era soldiers by Frederick Hart, known as The Three Servicemen, dedicated in 1984; and a bronze sculpture of three Vietnam-era servicewomen attending to a wounded male GI, by Glenna Goodacre, known as the Vietnam Women's Memorial and dedicated in 1993. Lin's wall is the most important work of commemorative public art in America in the second half of the twentieth century.

The NVVM was the brainchild of Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran who, after seeing The Deer Hunter, a popular Hollywood film about the plight of Vietnam vets, founded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in 1979. This organization was devoted solely to obtaining a prominent federal site for a national memorial to Vietnam veterans, raising money for the memorial, and commissioning a design. In 1980 a national design competition produced a radically new approach to commemorative public art. The winner of the competition was Maya Lin, an undergraduate architecture student at Yale, whose design called for an abstract sculpture influenced by the aesthetic of contemporary earthworks. This aesthetic is based on the idea that a sculpture is inextricably bound up with its site, and that the artwork is a place rather than an object. Lin's memorial featured a wedge-shaped black granite retaining wall pressed into the landscape. Its surface bore the names of over 58,000 Vietnam veterans killed or missing in action, in the order of their death or disappearance. The granite, polished to a reflective sheen, merged the reflections of visitors with the names of the dead.

This design created a great deal of controversy. Opponents, who had expected a representational, white, and vertical monument, called Lin's design a "black gash of

shame." Some were upset that the competition winner was a young Asian-American female. A compromise was reached when powerful conservative elements in the Reagan administration demanded the inclusion of a traditional representational sculpture at the memorial site. Hart's Three Servicemen was a detailed representation of Vietnam soldiers, one of them an African-American soldier—a nod to the sacrifice this group made in Vietnam and the first-ever depiction of an African American in a federal memorial. The inclusion of this statue in turn necessitated the second statue to acknowledge the contributions of more than 10,000 women who served in Vietnam.

Since its dedication, Lin's wall has been one of the most-visited sites in the nation's capital. It has helped to burnish the public image of Vietnam veterans in the postwar era and acts as a site of powerful emotional catharsis. It also revolutionized memorial design in America, transforming monuments from passively observed statuary to places experienced over time and space. Moreover, the success of the wall began a national revival of public commemorative art and spurred the creation of hundreds of federal, state, and local memorials to veterans of Vietnam, the Korean War, and World War II. Specific aspects of Lin's design appear in many of these. The wall also influenced the Oklahoma City National Memorial (2000), which honors the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City terrorist bombing, and design schemes for memorials to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Grunts; Vietnam Veterans.

Capasso, Nicholas J. "The National Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Context: Commemorative Public Art in America, 1960–1997." Ph.D. diss., Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, 1998.

Griswold, Charles L. "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall: Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography." Critical Inquiry 12 (summer 1986): 688–719.

Scruggs, Jan, and Swerdloe, Joel. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial: To Heal a Nation. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Strait, Jerry L., and Strait, Sandra S. Vietnam War Memorials: An Illustrated Reference to Veterans Tributes throughout the United States. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1988.

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