Vietnam Memorial

By Chantal Zoe Chaine

    There is a big, black wall. Covered in names, names of people who are gone now. Buried under thousands of memories. Bathed in thousands of tears. Black, the color of death. Black, the color of remembering. Remembering the war, remembering the forgotten. Just a wall, just a big black wall. This is the Vietnam Memorial. There is no judgment, there is no blame, there is no status. Just the names, each one gone. 60,000 people. This is where people come to remember.

    Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Memorial. She was an art student participating in a nationwide competition. When she entered her pastel drawings, she never thought that she might actually win. Hers was one of the 1,441 entries, which included a forty foot rocking chair with a machine gun on it, a two acre American flag, and a two story combat boot. The man who had the idea to build the memorial, Jon Scruggs, himself a Vietnam veteran, was first opposed to Maya Lin’s design. However, as the team of three or four people went through the entries, they soon came to the conclusion that the black wall was the most meaningful and by far the most creative design, and an excellent choice to represent the losses sustained in Vietnam. When Jon Scruggs thought that people would criticize the design, he was correct, though that is true of anything “untraditional” that anyone does, or even has an idea for. People thought that the color was too depressing, and the fact that it was set into the ground would make it too dark. They eventually came to a compromise; they would mount an American flag and a statue of three soldiers next to the memorial. Maya Lin didn’t want either of those things to interfere with her first idea, and in consequence the statue and flag were placed away from the monument.

The monument itself is simply names carved on black slabs of polished rock. The names are arranged in order of death. This gives it more of an individual feel, so instead of finding your relative in a huge list of Smiths, you find him in his very last moment of life, the moment when he realized that he wasn’t going home.

Everyone who goes to the memorial has their own reasons and feeling for being there. As one bystander said, “When we see those names carved in stone, we are reminded of the high price of freedom.”