The Wall at 40

The Wall. When you go to Washington, no need to say anything else.  Technically it is the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, and it is unlike any other war memorial I have ever seen in any country. Designed by 21 year old Maya Lin, many were skeptical when it was first unveiled: but it has become hallowed ground, a place in the national consciousness which brings tears to the eyes of visitors, regardless of whether they had any personal involvement with it, or the war to whose fighters it is dedicated.

The Wall is 40 this Friday. Dedicated during Reagan’s first term, its design was controversial. Most war memorials are Greco-Roman style above ground white marble ideals of war, dedicated to the spirit  or nobility of war, possibly to some one or group of heroes from the conflict. The Wall…it’s a graphic black slash, a lightning stroke of black marble, carved only with the names of those who fell. They are ordered only by their date of loss, with no rank to differentiate them, just as Death took them, dispassionately, without rank, race or precedence.

Reagan didn’t speak at its dedication. Neither did the VA Secretary, famously hounded from office by intemperate remarks about the very Veterans he was supposed to serve after describing vets’ groups as “greedy” and Agent Orange  effects as “acne”. Instead, and probably more appropriately, it fell to the newly confirmed Deputy Administrator, former POW Cmdr. (ret) Everett Alvarez,  the first American aviator captured when his A-4 was shot down.

“Oh yeah, I had concerns. It was a tumultuous time,” the 84-year-old Alvarez recalled in a recent phone interview with Military.com.

“At the time, I had to deal with this trench. Initially, I thought it was unkind,” Alvarez said of the memorial’s black walls, which extended along a walkway and reached out to grasp at ground level.

At the time vets and serving military were not as revered as today – most were portrayed as broken losers or psychos who could not readapt, the usual Hollywood hooey.  No one was sure what the vets and their familes would think until it opened on November 11th.

At the ceremony on Nov. 11, 1982, the crowd surged forward at the conclusion of the remarks, taking down, with the help of the National Park Service, the snow fence that separated them from the walls. They reached out to touch, chiseled into the granite, the names of those they knew — to speak to them, to leave behind a note, or maybe their jungle boots, or a pack of cigarettes, or a can of beer.

As he watched the emotional response, Alvarez said, “I changed my view” on the memorial as he “realized how it affected the public,” and what it would mean to future generations.

“What struck me was the tremendous outpouring of the people, the veterans that came for the dedication and their families,” he said. “That was heartwarming. It is, I would have to say, very therapeutic in a way for a lot of people.”

Veterans who come to the memorial, located off Constitution Avenue NW near the Lincoln Memorial, for the first time can find the experience overwhelming.

“I felt like I had walked into a cathedral,” former Army 1st Lt. Marsha Four, a nurse who served in Vietnam from 1969 to 1970, said of her first sight of the memorial in 1992. “At night, I came up over a rise and, all of a sudden, the wall comes up out of the earth. I literally fell down on my knees. It was so powerful to see the wall and all those names.

“It’s simple, it’s blunt and it’s the truth,” she said of the memorial. The message is that “this is what happened. This is the sacrifice we made.”

Military Times

Good article. Might be a good read this Friday. It’s nice to have the ‘thank you for your service’ and free lunches from the folks who never served…but the Wall is different.

Category: Historical, Holidays, Vietnam