The Lessons of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
When Maya Ying Lin, the young designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was asked what she thought would happen when people first experienced the memorial in person, she responded hesitantly with an encouraging answer. She didn’t say what she intuitively knew: “They'll cry.”
Lin was an undergraduate student of architecture at Yale University when the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Fund (VVMF) announced an open competition for the design of the memorial in the fall of 1980. Inspired by the novelty of the challenge, one of her professors adjusted his course plan to assign the competition to his students as a graded class project. As part of that assignment, Lin traveled to Washington, DC, over Thanksgiving break to visit the Mall, the hallowed ground designated to be the site of the memorial, home to some of the nation’s most important landmarks. She visited the park and later recalled her initial perceptions: “Living people enjoyed a sunny, open park that should not be taken from them nor be trivialized into a mere setting for some big monument.” Her sensitivity to the public’s use of the area made her determined to design a memorial that would harmonize with its “living” surroundings.
The idea for the memorial started to crystallize in her mind as she surveyed the landscape. Lin envisioned cutting into the earth as though it were a piece of rock to be polished: “Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it.” Lin also thought about death and what it means to the living. She saw death as “a sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over, a scar.” Armed with impressions gained from her trip and insights into the complex interplay between life and death, Lin returned to Yale to ponder her final design.
Ultimately, she decided to center the design around two 200-foot-long black granite rocks (later changed to 250 feet to fit in all the names), which would converge at an angle while rising from the earth. She envisioned that people would descend into the earth and read the names of the 58,000 dead and missing on the wall. Her professor advised her that the angle between the walls should have some special meaning, so she designed them in such a way as to have them pointing to and thus linking two other significant markers of the country’s past—the Washington Memorial to the east and the Lincoln Memorial to the west. Given the geography, this meant that the angle where the two walls met would be approximately 125 degrees.
Finally, Lin considered the placement of the names. She took inspiration from a war memorial in Thiepval, France, that honored the casualties of the Somme Offensive. Although that monument consists of a great arch and two arch tunnels with over 73,000 names inscribed on it, it manages to blend seamlessly with the surrounding area. The net effect is to lead visitors on a journey from “violence to serenity.” Lin wanted her design to achieve a similar effect.
She decided to list the names on the memorial in their chronological order of death or disappearance so that visitors would be transported symbolically to a specific time. She intended for the names and the order in which they were presented to tell the story of the Americans who fought in Vietnam. The names of the first and last persons to die would meet at the vertex to form a continuum. There, at the vertex, the list would start with the year 1959 and continue to the right until the wall is finally “eaten” by the earth. The wall would rise again on the opposite side as though it had gone around the world and then come out of the earth, continuing along until the years 1975 and 1959 meet. With the completion of her design, Lin, along with more than 1,400 others, both professionals and amateurs, submitted her plans to be judged.
The very idea for the memorial arose less than two years earlier. It originated with Jan Scruggs, a rifleman during the Vietnam War who was wounded in 1969 and sent home. Given the poor treatment many veterans faced when they returned to the United States, he was long haunted by the possibility that no one would remember the names of those who had served in Vietnam and wanted to build something that would appropriately honor them. Indeed, the war remained a highly charged subject in the minds of Americans. Unable to sleep after watching a showing of Michael Cimono’s The Deer Hunter, a drama about the ways in which the war severely disrupted and impacted the lives of three American friends, he told his wife the next morning: “I’m going to build a memorial to all the guys who served in Vietnam. It’ll have the names of everyone killed.”
After numerous setbacks, Scruggs eventually managed to establish the VVMF, and Congress soon granted the organization a two-acre plot on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., where a memorial would be constructed through private contributions. After President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation authorizing this process, Scruggs and others in the VVMF selected Paul D. Spreiregen, a leading authority on architectural design, as the professional advisor for a design competition. Working with the VVMF, Spreiregen, in turn, selected a jury comprised of prominent professionals in architecture, art, and design to ensure the competition remained as fair and straightforward as possible. They were tasked with making an architecturally and aesthetically sound judgment in choosing a design that would be sensitive toward Vietnam veterans. By selecting a “neutral” jury consisting of professionals, the VVMF also intended to keep the contest as apolitical as possible. As part of this goal, the VVMF intentionally did not allow veterans or parents of soldiers killed in the war to serve on the selection committee, nor anyone else who might have a biased opinion about America’s involvement in Vietnam. In this way, they believed they could ward off potential political confrontations and initiate “a process based on the highest standards for conducting design competitions.” Further, by keeping the entries anonymous and reviewing them in a blind merit-based process, they could not be accused of giving special consideration to any veterans or bereaved mothers who might submit entries—or of heartlessly rejecting them.
The guidelines for the competition included three basic requirements: honoring those who died during the war; maintaining an apolitical stance in the design; and demonstrating sensitivity to the surrounding monuments. Specifically, the design competition handbook read as follows:
The memorial will make no political statement regarding the war or its conduct. It will transcend those issues. The hope is that the creation of the memorial will begin a healing process, a reconciliation of the grievous divisions wrought by the war. Through the memorial both supporters and opponents of the war may find a common ground for recognizing the sacrifice, heroism, and loyalty which were also a part of the Vietnam experience. Through such a recognition the nation will resolve its history fully. Then the Vietnam Veterans Memorial may also become a symbol of national unity, a focal point for remembering the war’s dead, the veterans, and the lessons learned through a tragic experience.
Lin’s design clearly succeeded in paying tribute to the dead and displayed sensitivity to the surrounding monuments, but was it apolitical? In selecting her design after a three-week process, the judges either believed so or chose to ignore this last criterion. Reflecting on the competition, Spreiregen later wrote, “At the time of the competition the ‘post modernist’ movement was at its peak, and many of the submissions were of that inclination,” and the judges didn’t think that such a memorial would work for a diverse culture. Many of those submissions depended on allusion and symbol, a predilection the jury found wanting. As one juror noted, “Confused times need simple forms”—not, we might infer, “deconstructed “monuments or something with needlessly complex geometries. For this reason, the selection committee especially appreciated the simplicity of Lin’s design and its contemplative and reflective nature. They responded positively to the unique way in which the two walls came together where the names of the last and first fallen veterans met, after having shot toward the two surrounding monuments and on past eternity. As the design is horizontal rather than vertical, the judges also believed, as Lin had anticipated, that the walls would not upset the natural environment and that the structure would complement the site superbly. Noted one juror, “Most of the memorial is already there. It’s the site, and the vistas from it.”
The moment the winning plan went public in May 1981, however, people found cause for offense. Some labeled the monument a “wailing wall” and a “black gash of shame.” After the first press conference unveiling the design, the VVMF asked Lin not to voice her opinions publicly. They would do the fighting for her, the foundation said, explaining that her age, race, and “hippie” appearance might alienate her from many veterans and, in turn, strengthen the opposition’s numbers. Lin’s admission that she knew nothing about the war and that her approach to death might be considered somewhat “cold and cynical,” Scruggs later wrote, risked alienating even more members of the public.
The most prominent arguments against the design included comments like: “The memorial is below ground, denoting shame” and “It is black, a color of shame.” Although at the time many of Lin’s intentions remained misunderstood, her choice of color and placement stemmed from the fact that the stone is cut into a hillside and is exposed to the sun all day long, while having an open view toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The black color was necessary for legibility, as it would have been very difficult to read the names off a white background. Only after some supportive comments by one of the United States’ highest-ranking black officers, General George Price, did controversy abate over the color. Price stated: “Black is not a color of shame. I am tired of it being called so by you. Color meant nothing on the battlefields. We are all equal in combat. Color should mean nothing now.”
Construction on the memorial began the following spring, and it was completed in November 1982, eighteen months after the selection of Lin’s design. Notably, President Ronald Reagan did not attend its dedication that month. The war and, by extension, the memorial remained too hot of a political issue—the scar was still too raw and open. The grass, as Lin initially imagined it, clearly hadn’t yet begun its healing process. Due to the emotionally and politically charged nature of the Vietnam War, debates over the memorial were expected. Public art almost always invites controversy, no matter how much care is taken to avoid conflicts. Experiences associated with the Vietnam War were so varied that it was unlikely that any one piece of art could encompass them all. Further, many people simply refused to consider other points of view or perspectives, which made it nearly impossible for everyone to agree on any one design.
Only when Lin finally started discussing her intentions publicly could anyone begin to appreciate the layers of meaning behind the deceptively simple structure she had designed. She wanted the veterans to see their actual reflections in the stone as they read the names, their images overlapping the inscriptions; her idea was to bring the spectators back to the time frame of the war, symbolically joining them with the dead as though they were all back in Vietnam. This was one of the reasons for her choice of black granite. On the surface, this may have been a simple concept, but the underlying meaning of having one’s own reflection intermingle with the names on the walls is tremendously complex. Lin wanted people to descend into the earth, to create a link between the living and the dead. Any one artist’s figurative or allegorical interpretation of the Vietnam War surely would have less meaning than the human element involved in seeing oneself and one’s living environment reflected in stone behind the names of dead soldiers, she believed.
Lin considered the memorial to be a monument not only to those who had died but also to those who had lost loved ones. She did not want people to simply come and look and feel grateful to soldiers who had risked and lost their lives for the “greater good.” She wanted people to relive the deaths, to actively participate in them, and to use their imaginations to create an individualized memorial. The chronological listing of names also prompts visitors to recall the past and America’s growing involvement in Vietnam, as the number of names increases in unison with the elevation of the granite walls. Indeed, Lin defends her design as being apolitical by explaining that any projections onto it are absolutely personal. This is a point that was understood by the jurors. As one of them observed, “The design is like a Chinese vase—you bring to it what you are able to bring; you take away what you are able to take away.”
Though some critics disparaged the memorial—“To bury them now in a black stone sarcophagus, sunk into a hollow in the earth below eye level, is like spitting on their graves”—most reviewers were very enthusiastic about the design and the feelings derived from experiencing it. Many commented on how the walls feather into the earth, creating an illusion of infinity while reinforcing the concept of death through Mother Earth’s “protective power” over the dead.
The impact of the memorial became dramatically clear through the reactions of veterans and grieving loved ones upon first being in the presence of the granite walls. After the first panel was installed, family members of the fallen were invited to the unveiling. “The families did something unexpected,” writes Scruggs. “They touched the stone. The touches were more than soft. They were gentle, filled with feelings as if the stone were alive." As one reviewer noted in a piece for Art in America: “No one except the designer realized how vividly the memorial would come to life through such interactions while faces and campfires and flags and sky could all be seen reflected in the long, mirror-black granite wall among the innumerable carved names of the dead, in an astonishing integration of almost everything a monument could say about war.”
In a sense, the wall lives. By touching the stone and the etching of the names, the living bond with the dead—after all, a name is a symbolic term that embodies everything about one's existence. By making this inanimate contact with their loved ones, the living are often better able to cope with death and accept it. The etching of the names in granite, which will stand for thousands of years, makes death official and final in the mind’s eye. Also, by seeing the name of a lost loved one among the names of so many others, the memorial allows mourners to find some sense of solace—they are not alone in their suffering or pain. Thus, from the outset, the wall was as personal as a mother crying for her lost child, or as public as a nation weeping for a troubled history that had yet to be resolved. For the living, “Frustration and anger were dissolving into introspection and acceptance.”
As Lin had anticipated, the memorial both induced a sense of loss and, at the same time, produced a cathartic effect. Was she conscious of participating in a ritual that would help tame a national trauma when she conceived her design? As a reflection of death, the memorial allows the living to fuse with the dead through sight and touch. As a reflection of the psychology of mourning, Lin’s creativity resulted in a place for ritual that is soothing in itself; visitors symbolically repeat the mourning process and thus master it every time they come and go, touch the stone and leave.
Still, powerful critics remained. Further, many of those who grew to accept and appreciate Lin’s intentions thought the memorial was incomplete. At the very least, they argued, it needed an American flag. Eventually, the VVMF reached a compromise with those most opposed to the memorial’s minimalist design. It was decided that an eight-foot bronze sculpture of three anguished soldiers (designed by Frederick Hart, who had been part of a team whose design placed third in the competition), together with a 50-foot flagpole from which the Stars and Stripes could fly, would stand 150-feet away in a small plaza at the entrance of the memorial. The opposition was finally appeased; they felt that veterans would better relate to this realistic interpretation of the war and appreciate the direct recognition that they had fought and bled for the United States.
Though Lin was upset that such a compromise meant, in effect, that a mustache would be drawn on her design, she was somewhat relieved because the alternatives could have been worse. Indeed, one proposal had the statute sitting atop the apex of the wall, which would have made it the primary focus of the site, but in the final configuration, the three weary soldiers emerge from distant trees, positioned to look at if not guard the names of their fallen brothers and sisters.
Two years after the first dedication ceremony, a second one was held for the statue. In a sign that any remaining controversy over the memorial had been settled—that the grass had finally started its healing process—President Reagan attended the dedication. In a short address, he said,
It's almost 10 years now since U.S. military involvement in Vietnam came to a close. Two years ago, our government dedicated the memorial bearing the names of those who died or are still missing. Every day, the families and friends of those brave men and women come to the wall and search out a name and touch it. The memorial reflects as a mirror reflects, so that when you find the name you’re searching for you find it in your own reflection. And as you touch it, from certain angles, you’re touching, too, the reflection of the Washington Monument or the chair in which great Abe Lincoln sits. Those who fought in Vietnam are part of us, part of our history. They reflected the best in us. No number of wreaths, no amount of music and memorializing will ever do them justice but it is good for us that we honor them and their sacrifice. And it’s good that we do it in the reflected glow of the enduring symbols of our Republic. The fighting men depicted in the statue we dedicate today, the three young American servicemen, are individual only in terms of their battle dress; all are as one, with eyes fixed upon the memorial bearing the names of their brothers in arms. On their youthful faces, faces too young to have experienced war, we see expressions of loneliness and profound love and a fierce determination never to forget.
Today, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the most visited memorial on the National Mall, receiving more than five million visitors per year, and is almost universally celebrated and praised: “It is still far and away the greatest memorial of modern times—the most beautiful, the most heart-wrenching, the most subtle, and the most powerful.” Given the context of the Vietnam War and deep questions about its prosecution and the United States’ actions in it, a large part of the memorial’s attraction is due to its focus on those who served—and sacrificed—and not on the war itself. Each individual is treated as a part of a group in which all individuals have one very tragic connection. No one person is elevated over another. No reference is made to anyone’s rank or branch of service—nor to their race, gender, class, or age. All names are treated and rendered equally. It is a tribute to individuals, not to the country. Yet, not only does it symbolize a nation’s complicated grief and the public’s attempts to come to terms with that grief, but it also more generally and no less importantly connects all Americans—past, present, and future.
While memorials can help heal a nation’s wounds, as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has powerfully demonstrated, they can, as we have seen in recent years, also open and intensify them. It might be true, as some note, that any argument over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial “dissolves” the moment you enter it, but this is not the case for all memorials. Though some people argue against the construction and installation of public art due to the division it can create, the construction of memorials must continue for the sake of healing national losses and wounds—and for building and maintaining a sense of unity and shared destiny for generations to follow. Indeed, there will invariably and inexorably be future national traumas and wars that necessitate a memorial of some kind. Not every episode of national trauma needs to be recognized with a lasting memorial, and not every memorial will be a triumph from an aesthetic, experiential, psychological, and even political standpoint, but the process that led to the Vietnam War Memorial offers useful lessons for future initiatives that aim to commemorate, remember, and unite.
Specifically, the memorial itself would never have come to fruition in its final form or have achieved its stated goals were it not for six key factors:
The idea for the memorial arose organically and not as a political maneuver by any party or from individuals with questionable or ulterior motives.
The memorial was not designed or constructed in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War. Challenges and opposition to the design and perhaps to the very idea of a memorial itself would likely have been far more pronounced and perhaps even insurmountable if the VVMF had initiated the process in 1975 as opposed to 1980.
Although no process for designing and constructing a memorial can ever be entirely apolitical, just as no memorial ever can be, the VVMF made efforts to transcend politics as a stated and aspirational goal. Striving for this goal in carefully defined ways helped generate initial public support across the political spectrum and ultimately helped ensure that the memorial would serve to heal and unify rather than further wound and divide.
The VVMF adhered to a transparent process with a specific mandate and clearly delineated rules that could be defended. Not every memorial design need come from an open submission process, but whatever process is chosen for selecting a design or designer, it should be perceived as fair and transparent—and not predetermined in advance by an elite class for purposes of political expediency or gain.
The VVMF responded to criticisms and objections and defended Lin and her design while remaining open to reasonable compromise. As a privately funded memorial on public ground, the memorial, in the end, arguably benefited from the addition of the statue and U.S. flag, which, in the minds of many, enriches the site and overall experience. Those elements made the memorial more welcoming to those disturbed by the absence of the flag—or any other notable American symbol—and to those who, due to their own experiences during or after the war, read the abstract design in a negative light.
The VVMF pursued a fully blind process based on merit. The jurors chose Lin’s design because they judged it to be the best and most closely aligned with their clearly outlined criteria. As Lin herself acknowledges, if her age, gender, and race had been known in advance, her design would very likely have not been selected. For the VVMF, only one marker of identity was ever relevant—that the designer be American.
Parts of this essay first appeared in Mind & Human Interaction.
Kurt Volkan is the editor of Presser.