Vietnam Veterans Memorial

        

          When I was younger, my family and I traveled to Washington D.C. to do the normal touristy things that are there to do in the capital. We visited the Lincoln Memorial, the National Air and Space Museum, the US Mint and many other museums that scorching summer. The only distinct memory I have of the trip was when we visited the Vietnam War Memorial. The day was super hot and humid and my family had already been walking the streets of D.C. for most of the day when we decided to stop by the memorial.

At the time, I did not fully understand the scope of the Vietnam War and how detrimental it was to the Vietnamese as well as all of the backlash it received here in the states, so I felt proud to be standing next to the enormous black wall covered with the names engraved of those who died protecting our country. I felt extremely patriotic, small, sad and taken aback standing by the enormous wall. At the memorial, there were papers and pencils so you could place it on the wall and shade over the names to take home. I shaded a few names and stood back away from the wall to see just how many names were on it. There were 57,939 names of fallen American Vietnam war veterans on the wall at the time, and as of Memorial Day 2013, that number had risen to 58,286. The additions to the Memorial were those who were injured during the war between 1957 to 1975 and died of their wounds (Wikipedia).

This is a sketch of the monumnet 

The memorial was designed by an undergraduate at Yale University, Maya Ying Lin, born in Athens, Ohio in 1959. Her parents fled from China in 1949 when Mao-Tse-tung took control of China, and she is a native-born American citizen. She acted as a consultant with the architectural firm of Cooper- Lecky Partnership on the construction of the Memorial (http://thewall-usa.com/information.asp). The walls are 246 feet 9 inches long. They are sunk into the ground, with the earth behind them. (The two walls meet in a ‘V’ shape) At the highest tip (the apex where they meet), they are 10.1 feet high, and they taper to a height of 8 inches at their extremities. Stone for the wall came from Bangalore, Karnataka, India, and was deliberately chosen because of its reflective quality. When a visitor looks upon the wall, his or her reflection can be seen simultaneously with the engraved names, which is meant to symbolically bring the past and present together. One wall points toward the Washington Monument, the other in the direction of the Lincoln Memorial, meeting at an angle of 125° 12′. Each wall has 72 panels, 70 listing names (numbered 1E through 70E and 70W through 1W) and 2 very small blank panels at the extremities. There is a pathway along the base of the Wall, where visitors may walk (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Veterans_Memorial). It is quite spectacular to feel the sense of sinking into the ground as you walk along the memorial.

Looking back, I now realize that I participated in “dark tourism” when we visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In researching the facts for this blog post, I came across the criteria for the design. The monument was supposed to:

1. Be reflective and contemplative in character;

2. Harmonize with its surroundings;

3. Contain the names of those who had died in the conflict or who were still missing;

4. Make no political statement about the war. (http://thewall-usa.com/information.asp)

What I find the most interesting is this final point, the memorial was not supposed to make any political statement surrounding the Vietnam War and all of the controversies that went with it. The wall does not even take into account the fact that the men and women who were drafted for the war were just as poor as the enemies they were fighting and many of them most likely did not want to take part in the war effort at all. The memorial is completely one-sided in the fact that it also does not address how many Vietnamese were killed. In the above paragraph, I italicized the wall’s “reflective quality” so as to “symbolically bring the past and present together” because in my opinion, that is not what the wall does. The reflective quality implicates you as an observer who passively looks at the wall as if you are not taking part in the perpetuation of the untold history behind the war. The memorial does not dictate accounts of the Vietnam War objectively but paints the picture of an “innocent” and “patriotic” America that can do no wrong.

I remember feeling so small and insignificant next to that wall, and I could see myself reflected off of the polished stone. Throughout the time we spent in Washington, we took numerous pictures of all of the monuments and museums we could, except we never took photos of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a sense, I am glad that we did not take photos when we went there, but I still have the shaded names. If I ever decide to travel and be a tourist again after this class and go back to Washington D.C., I’m sure the reflection of myself that I will see looking back at me as I gaze at the wall once more will be more alert and suspicious of the story that is not being conveyed at the memorial and the ones in our textbooks.

Thank you for taking the time to read this blog post! 

-Meagan Davis