"If you can't accept death, you'll never get over it. So what the Memorial's about is honesty. . . You have to accept, and admit that this pain has occurred, in order for it to be healed, in order for it to be cathartic. . . All I was saying in this piece was the cost of war is these individuals.
And we have to remember them first."
-Maya Lin**
-Maya Lin**
At the age of 21, Maya Lin, a Yale student of architecture, created the design that would become the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. The Wall, as the Memorial is called, consists of two 246-foot long polished black granite walls that intersect at a 125 degree angle. As of May 31, 2010, 58,267 names of those who died in Vietnam are inscribed on the Wall. The names are listed by date of death.
The Wall was dedicated in 1982. Today it is the most visited of our national monuments. Over 25 million people have visited the wall, and many leave behind flowers, letters and other tokens of remembrance. The objects have been collected by The National Park Service and now form The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection. Representative objects from the collection are displayed at the Smithsonian Institution in an on-going exhibit Personal Legacy: the Healing of a Nation.
Photo credit: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Smithsonian Institution, 1992. http://photo2.si.edu/legacy/legacylinks.html/
*Truckin' by Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and lyricist Robert Hunter.
**quoted by Freida Lee Mock, True Lives, American Documentary, Inc. and American Public Television, http://amdoc.org/projects/truelives/pg_maya.html/
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