When Was The Vietnam Memorial Built

Making the Memorial

It’s taken me years to be able to discuss the making of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, partly because I needed to move past it and partly because I had forgotten the process of getting it built. I would not discuss the controversy surrounding its construction and it wasn’t until I saw the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision that I was able to remember that time in my life. But I wrote the body of this essay just as the memorial was being completed—in the fall of 1982. Then I put it away…until now.

I think the most important aspect of the design of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was that I had originally designed it for a class I was taking at Yale and not for the competition. In that sense, I had designed it for me—or, more exactly, for what I believed it should be. I never tried to second-guess a jury. And it wasn’t until after I had completed the design that I decided to enter it in the competition.

The design emerged from an architectural seminar I was taking during my senior year. The initial idea of a memorial had come from a notice posted at the school announcing a competition for a Vietnam veterans memorial. The class, which was on funereal architecture, had spent the semester studying how people, through the built form, express their attitudes toward death. As a class, we thought the memorial was an appropriate design idea for our program, so we adopted it as our final design project.

At that point, not much was known about the actual competition, so for the first half of the assignment we were left without concrete directions for what “they” were looking for or even who “they” were. Instead, we had to determine for ourselves what a Vietnam memorial should be. Since a previous project had been to design a memorial for World War memorial was a tomblike underground structure that I deliberately made to be a very futile and frustrating experience. I remember the professor of the class coming up to me afterward, saying quite angrily, “If I had a brother who died in that war, I would never want to visit this memorial.” I was somewhat puzzled that he didn’t quite understand that World War would be of such devastation that none of us would be around to visit any memorial, and that my design was instead a pre-war commentary. In asking myself what a memorial to a third world war would be, I came up with a political statement that was meant as a deterrent.

Greater Orange News Service: Traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial ...

One of several traveling ½ scale replicas of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington D.C., the traveling exhibit is called “The Wall that Heals”. The traveling exhibits visit hundreds of communities across the U.S. each year allowing thousands of veterans and others to visit the wall within their own communities. Part of the mission of the Wall is to match names of those killed or missing in action to photographs of those who served. One of the goals in remembering the Vietnam War (one of the most controversial wars in U.S. history) with a physical memorial was to do so by avoiding controversy with any commentary on the war itself. However, the actual design of the memorial became controversial. The winning design for the memorial was chosen from over 1400 entries submitted in a national contest. The wining designer was Maya Ying Lin, a 21 year old architecture student at Yale University. The unconventional design quickly became controversial especially among veterans with the black stone wall memorial being nicknamed the “black gash of shame”. Many early prominent supporters of the memorial withdrew their support. President Ronald Regan’s Secretary of the Interior James Watt refused to issue a building permit for the memorial. One of those in attendance at the 1982 dedication ceremonies of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial in Washington D.C. was John Devitt of Stockton, California. The Vietnam veteran was so moved by what he saw as the healing nature of the memorial that he decided to make a transportable version of the Wall- a “Traveling Wall” for those who could not travel to the memorial in the nation’s Capital. Devitt established the Vietnam Combat Veterans organization using his own finances to fund the building of the first half-sized replica of the Wall. It was first displayed in Tyler Texas in 1984. The waiting list for the Moving Wall quickly grew that Vietnam Combat Veterans built two more Walls. Now there are several that move throughout the United States attracting millions of visitors. All were paid for through private contributions. Traveling with the Wall is a Traveling Museum and Information Center. It is the goal of the exhibit to serve as a resource for people to learn about friends and loved ones lost in the war. With the use of scanner technology, visitors can upload photos and remembrances of loved ones on the Wall. They are saved and forwarded to the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Education Center in Washington D.C.

National Parks

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

The Vietnam Memorial

Building a Speech

The Vietnam War on campus, other voices, more distant drums