“People gloss over your deaths by saying you ‘gave your lives for your country.’ They say that like we had a choice.” – Vietnam vet, in memorial to his 58,000 dead comrades
Left to right as you face the 58,000-plus names of the dead engraved on the black granite wall of the Vietnam Memorial, which was dedicated in Washington, D.C., this week (Nov. 13) in 1982, you first come upon one name, all alone: John Anderson Jr.
And then, as the memorial rises in height and more names cluster together, you read, “William L Jarboe, Charles F Huff, Raymond A Borduas, Marvin Murray, Edward Quinones, Clifford Staples, Amelio Nino, Francisco X Licea, Marcus R Asplund.”
And on and on, name after name, until the wall reaches its peak, and then starts to descend and the names thin out until you get to the end of the wall and you read one last name, also all alone: Jessie C Alba.
And you think many things. First, you are reminded of what a “melting pot” America truly is. Tragic as the war was, the band of brothers who died in it included William C. Poole III and Thomas E. Walker, but also Julio Hernandez and Marcial Garcia. And Luther Burns and Jerome Grunwald. And Luis Snakovsky and Tadeusz Borowski. And Patrick Conroy and Anthony O’Keefe. And Gerald Cohen and Richard Klinkenberg. WASPS, Poles, Italians, Hispanics, African-Americans, Irish, Jews, you name it. Perhaps some of them were foreigners at birth, but they all died Americans.
Second, you are struck by how the design of the wall, purposeful or not, correlates with the escalation, and then de-escalation, of the war. The names, like the number who died, start out small — just John Anderson Jr at first — and then grow as the wall (and the war) expands until it peaks in the middle, and then the wall descends and the cluster of names gets smaller, just as America’s presence, and death toll, in Vietnam got smaller, leaving us, at last, with just Jessie C Alba.
Third, you remember how controversial was the decision to choose the design submitted by Maya Lin, a young architectural student at Yale University. Yet it was the right decision. Little known today, her design was chosen unanimously, and she skillfully met all of the criteria — that the memorial be “contemplative and harmonious” with its surroundings, that it make no political statement, and that it display the names of all who died.
Today the Vietnam Memorial is the most visited piece of public American artwork created in the 20th Century. Grateful for the service of those whose names are engraved upon it, I visit it — actually, I visit them — every year.
