The Vietnam Memorial — “The Wall” — was dedicated this week (Nov. 13) in 1981, and while I have previously written about my annual visits to it, I have not written about how it was created.
Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam vet with multiple war wounds and severe emotional problems (probably from posttraumatic stress disorder), was the guiding force behind the memorial. Many of his post-Vietnam years were spent riding motorcycles, drinking and brooding until, in 1979, he saw the movie “The Deer Hunter,” which describes the war’s devastating effect on three soldiers from a small Pennsylvania steel town. The next day, Scruggs decided he would build a memorial that listed the names of every soldier who died in Vietnam, and that it should reside on the national mall in Washington, D.C., where, he noted, so many protests against the war had taken place.
With help from other vets (including Jim Webb, Vietnam vet, future secretary of the Navy, U.S. senator and, recently, Democratic presidential candidate), Scruggs created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to raise money and lobby for legislation that would authorize the memorial’s construction. The Fund also announced a national competition to design the memorial, with a selection committee of eight judges with backgrounds in sculpture, architecture and landscape architecture. On purpose, no Vietnam vets could be judges, because it was thought they would cow the other judges into deferring to their choice, regardless of its merit.
In May of 1981, the winning entry was announced, and most of those associated with the memorial, including Scruggs, were stunned that the design of a 21-year-old Yale architectural student, Maya Lin, had been chosen. Lin knew nothing about the war, knew no one who had fought in the war, and her design had originally been a sketch for an architecture class assignment, for which she got a B+ grade.
Veterans groups were infuriated at the black V-shaped wall — some said it resembled a boomerang — with the names of the dead to go from the wall’s apex, moving outward in chronological order of the date of each person’s death. There were countless attempts by both veterans groups and architectural organizations to replace the design with something more acceptable, but the selection committee, which had chosen Lin’s design unanimously, held firm.
It was the right decision. Today “The Wall” is the most visited piece of public American artwork created in the 20th Century, and those millions of people who visit it every year are profoundly moved by the experience. They include friends, families, and Vietnam vets.
Jan Scruggs among them. His successful completion of his mission to honor those who didn’t survive the war helped him not only survive, but turn his life around.
