Author:
Henry Hattemer

Date Written:
4/20/2003

Works Cited:

Griswold, Charles L. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall.” Critical Issues in Public Art. Ed. Harriet Senie and Sally Webster. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.

Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Avon Books, 1977.

Resources:

Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Official Site

Maya Lin

Maya Lin, architect.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Michael Herr, author and journalist.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a structure that is tailored to a variety of audiences simultaneously. The purpose, meaning, and experience of the wall reflect the visitor’s background in a way that can serve completely different impressions to people who may be standing directly adjacent to one another. Like the internet serves millions of different web pages depending on the surfer, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial tacitly takes requests from visitors and satisfies each one. The talents of Maya’s Memorial are as diverse as the people who view it, and this aspect of the structure lends timelessness and fame to stone that is ostensible meaningless and humble. To understand the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, one must examine the audiences, and how they come together to remember, respect, and learn at “a sort of national gravestone” (Senie and Webster 87).

The audiences could be divided into several groups. The furthest from the war may be the casual visitor. The casual visitor is the tourist with no direct connection or personal experience with the Vietnam War. The family vacation that makes a pass along the wall, the school group that files through, and the curious traveler who wanders in make up the casual visitor group. The next unit is made up of visitors who have a friend or relative who fought or died in the war. People who have experienced the intricacies of the war vicariously, whether on purpose or not, through the relations of those close to them, make up the connected visitor group. For each of them, the war may have vastly different connotations, but they are drawn together in a group because they share a common degree of association with the Vietnam War. The third type of visitor is not necessarily an obvious one. It was included after much thought, because there is a group of people to which the monument has a closer message than the casual or connected visitor. Soldiers, not necessarily veterans of any war, but the ordinary soldier, from the greenest of greenhorns in boot camp to the young seasoned officers, have a special bond with any memorial that serves their colleagues. The fourth and last group is made up of veterans, who are clearly served by the memorial and clearly have the closest ties with the war itself. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was made for them, and the most powerful reactions come from this group.

The primary ability of monuments, as Griswold suggested (Senie and Webster 74), is found in the Latin definition of the word monere, the origin of monument. Griswold, however, handily left out one definition of monere that can be found in every comprehensive Latin dictionary. Monere, in addition to meaning “remind, warn, advise, ” it can also mean to “admonish”. For each audience, certain abilities or purposes of monuments may apply or be inapplicable. This discrepancy is at the heart of the wall’s ability to serve multiple audiences.

The casual visitor is bombarded by all four functions of a monument. The casual visitor is the only one at the memorial who needs to be reminded of the historic battle against Communism. The danger of forgetting is perhaps the biggest fear of the memorial’s namesake, and it may be the only overt or stated purpose of the wall. Although the remind function is the most important, it is also inherently the easiest to accomplish. The mere existence of a memorial must remind visitors of a particular event or person. The casual visitor is reminded of the Vietnam War only briefly before the “warn” function kicks into high gear. As the visitor descends into the center of the memorial, the sheer number of names warns of the consequences of war, without commenting on the purpose of war, however. At the center of the wall, surrounded by the largest panels on which are chiseled the greatest number of names, the casual visitor will inevitably wonder for what reason the thousands of people perished. So the monument advises. One needs only to look at the ends of wall to see that they clearly point to the Washington and Lincoln Monuments, great moral forts held by Democracy and Freedom. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is design so that as you walk along the first half of the wall, you see only more wall and more names ahead of you. Only as you reach the midpoint and crux of the memorial do you turn slightly to see the great symbol of Democracy ahead, on the ascent. Lastly, the casual visitor may be the only visitor which the memorial admonishes. Guilt, justified or not, pervades the black stone and sharpens the reflections in the wall. A generation suffered in a questionable conflict, and the consequences certainly make some feel like petty patriots in the presence of 58,000 names of those who gave the ultimate sacrifice.

The connected visitor wants to be reminded of the Vietnam War even though he or she probably has enough personal memories of the events or people involved with it to remember it on his or her own. Connected visitors do not want the reminder in the same way that one wants to think of a happy moment such as a wedding or a winning goal- this sort of remembrance is therapeutic and respectful instead of blissful. If a casual and a connected visitor stand shoulder to shoulder at the memorial, the casual visitor would think of events and people highlighted by media coverage, while the connected visitor would recall close friends and relative, their connections to the war, and specific personal events that impressed upon them the severity of the situation. The connected visitor is also warned in a different way than the casual visitor. They are more likely to be familiar with the political reasons and implications of the war. Therefore, the warning may be about the spread of Communism more than the catastrophic nature of war itself. Maybe a certain individual may look at the stone wall and see a warning against a conflict that requires a draft lottery. The advice given by the memorial to the connected visitor is similar to that given to the casual visitor. The resolute arms of the wall point tirelessly at the reason for fighting, the altars upon which the ultimate sacrifice was given. Admonishment is not necessary, the connected visitor has lived adjacent to the war and is free of the guilt realized by casual visitors.

A soldier who makes a trip to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is met with yet another distinct experience. He is there to remember respectfully his colleagues who perished working the same job that he wakes up to every morning. He shares a certain brotherhood with every single name on the wall, a KIA family of men who took the same oath of service to their country. The visiting soldier is also warned of similar endeavors. The Vietnam war taught the United States a lot about foreign policy and warfare, and the wall of names warns soldiers in the same way a coach warns his players of the competition. The other side is working hard also, stay alert. A soldier and a casual visitor are standing side by side at the memorial. The casual visitor is being warned of the horrors of modern warfare, the soldier is being warned of the possibilities of guerrilla warfare as an antidote to superpowers. A soldier is not advised by the direction in which the walls point- he has already taken an oath to defend those values. He need not be admonished, for he has raised his right hand and sworn to protect and serve.

The veteran who visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ought to feel like a hero. The veteran can doubtlessly find the names of people who, at one point, were his closest friends in the world, chiseled into the stone indelibly. Veterans, the namesake of the monument, “are usually involved very emotionally and publicly in the Memorial” (Senie and Webster 86). The veteran has absorbed the warnings already, firsthand, has taken the oath to the most important American values, and has no reason to be admonished. The single function of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with respect to veterans, is to serve as a reminder, both of their fallen companions and of their personal contribution to the cause of the United States, whatever that may be. If a soldier was commission to create a memorial, he would haul forth the architectural equivalent of the three-line war story described by Herr (Herr 5). The veteran-designed memorial would be a rugged, jagged, jutting shard of stone heaved into the earth. The Park Service employee who stood next to it would have no interesting symbols or designations to exhibit. The stone would not consist of material from all 50 states, the number of just in the rock would not correspond to the number of years in the war, the rock would not point at anything else in particular. The great monument would be a huge raw chunk of anonymous rock from an anonymous location, tossed into the soil arbitrarily by an anonymous patriot, left to point in an arbitrary direction with an arbitrary number of sides and slants. It would serve one function of a monument, but it would serve it well. That rock would be a reminder.

The beauty and the genius of Maya Lin is that she understood that a modern monument “must speak to increasingly diverse groups” (Senie and Webster, Bk Cover). She created an enchanted mirror out of polished black stone. In the monument each visitor, from the most innocent child to the seasoned veteran, can see a reflection of their own features superimposed on the names of the dead. The wall speaks an infinite number of languages, to an infinitely diverse clientele. The hushed steps of passersby are a testimony to the respect given to the names, and the hushed critics are a testimony to the success of the monument in fulfilling every Latin meaning of the word “monere”. As Griswold wrote in Defining National Values, “The dead and living thus meet” (Senie and Webster 91).

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