Maya Lin's Wall and the Veterans Who Hated It
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Washington, D.C.
In nineteen eighty, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund held a design competition open to any American citizen. The rules were spare: the memorial had to be contemplative in character, harmonious with its surroundings, include the names of all who died or remained missing, and make no political statement about the war. One thousand four hundred twenty-one entries arrived. The judges awarded first place, unanimously, to entry number one thousand and twenty-six.
The designer was Maya Lin, a twenty-one-year-old architecture student at Yale University. She was the daughter of Chinese immigrants. She had submitted the entry as a class project. Her design was a V-shaped black granite wall set into the earth of Constitution Gardens, inscribed with the names of fifty-eight thousand three hundred eighteen Americans killed or missing in Vietnam, listed in chronological order of casualty.
The reaction from a significant portion of the veterans community and the political right was immediate and furious. One prominent critic called it a "black gash of shame and sorrow." Others described it as a "degrading ditch," a symbol of defeat rather than sacrifice. A group organized to demand a more traditional figurative monument. The commentary that attached itself to Lin's Chinese American identity was explicit and hostile.
The compromise was negotiated with the National Park Service and the memorial fund: Frederick Hart's bronze statue of three soldiers would be installed nearby, facing the wall. Hart had placed third in the original competition.
Maya Lin objected publicly to the compromise. She described it as introducing a simplistic narrative into a space designed for the complexity of grief.
The wall was dedicated on November thirteenth, nineteen eighty-two. Within hours of opening, veterans had begun leaving objects at the base. Letters. Photographs. Medals. A pair of boots. The objects accumulated. The National Park Service started collecting and cataloguing them. There are now over four hundred thousand items in the collection, one of the most documented spontaneous memorial practices in American history.
Whatever veterans felt about the design competition had little to do with what happened when they stood in front of their own names, or the names of the men they had served alongside.
