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The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was organized to plan, design and erect a memorial to Vietnam Veterans on the Mall. After accumulating nearly $8 million in private contributions, the Fund held a design contest for an apolitical memorial to those killed in Vietnam. There were 1,421 entries to the competition. The winning design was a simple, poignant, black granite wall, created by a 21 year-old Yale student, Maya Ying Lin, who had entered the contest as part of an architecture course.
Surpisingly, American natural resources were not used in the construction of the memorial. The wall was built with black granite imported from Bangalore, India. The 493-foot wall is inscribed with 58,249 names, both the deceased and missing. The deceased names’ are followed by a diamond; pluses follow the names of the missing. As the missing are declared dead, diamonds are super-imposed over the pluses.
The names are listed in the order of death, beginning in the center, at the highest point of the wall, under the date ‘1959.’ The names proceed in chronological order to the right, panel after panel. At the end of the wall, the names resume at the beginning of the left wall, again moving to the right, panel after panel, until the last death, recorded beside the date ‘1975.’
With such a recent war, many people visiting knew the servicemen killed. At the wall, they leave behind gifts and mementoes to their lost loved ones. Each night the National Park Service collects the items left at the wall, places each item in a bag marked with the number of the panel it was found at, and enters it into a collection maintained by the Smithsonian. Items from the collection were displayed at the Museum of National History, and will be again after its re-opening.
Although the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund went to great lengths to design an appropriate, reflective, and apolitical memorial to those killed in Vietnam, it didn’t please everyone. Detractors complained about the wall being black, that a portion of the memorial was below ground - they found symbolism to be offended by in every nook and cranny of the memorial. They pined for a more ‘traditional’ memorial, with inscriptions and figurative sculpture. So they were given an addition to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, The Three Soldiers, a 7-foot bronze piece sculpted by Frederick Hart and erected on November 11, 1984, found at N38 53.416 W077 02.899.
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