Author:
Henry Hattemer

Date Written:
4/14/2003

Resources:

Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Official Site

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

How to Build a Veterans Memorial

I wish Herr or O’Brien had included, after the chapter on how to tell a good war story, a chapter on how to build a great war monument or memorial. The existing Vietnam Memorial is very meaningful. It points to other meaningful monuments, it compels visitors to descend into its placid openness. A member of my group mentioned that the memorial clearly reflected the visitor in its polished marble- that must be meaningful. The sense that the memorial is the absence of material instead of the presence (because it is sunk into the earth instead of jutting out) must be meaningful. The fact that the first and last casualty’s names are adjacent, suggesting a circle of casualties, must be meaningful. Everything about the memorial is just so meaningful. A Vietnam Memorial designed by a soldier would not be so chalk full of symbolism. It would be the structural equivalent of the three-line war story- a rugged, jagged, shard of stone jutting out of the earth. The Park Service employee who stood next to the soldier-designed Vietnam Memorial would not have any interesting symbols or gimmicks to point out. Nobody’s face would be carved into the back of the stone. The stone would not consist of material from all 50 states. The number of juts in the rock would not correspond to the number of years of the war. The rock would not point at the Capitol or the Washington Monument. The great monument would be a huge raw chunk of anonymous rock from an anonymous location, heaved into the soil arbitrarily by an anonymous patriot, left to point in an arbitrary direction with an arbitrary number of sides and slants.

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