DEDICATION
Maya Lin flew in from Boston several days before the dedication, having finally been invited as something of an afterthought following the 60 Minutes embarrassment. She was given no special role nor was she publicly recognized or thanked. Grady Clay, the gracious Kentucky gentleman who had chaired the competition jury, met her at the airport, and they went immediately to the memorial for a quiet stroll and for official photographs. For the first time, she could see all the panels in place with the landscaping and the lighting finished. After all the wrangling over the inscriptions, she could read them in their final form:
In honor of the men and women of the Armed Forces of the United States who served in the Vietnam War. The names of those who gave their lives and of those who remain missing are inscribed in the order in which they were taken from us. Our nation honors the courage, sacrifice, and devotion to duty and country of its Vietnam veterans.
To see the cobblestone walkway complete, grandstands and the podium in place, was deeply affecting. It terrified her, in fact. “It was a strange feeling, to have had an idea that was totally yours be no longer a part of your mind but totally public, no longer yours.”
Even though a dune fence still surrounded the memorial, making it off-limits for another day, veterans were already walking the wall. When a few of them recognized her, they gathered around her emotionally and tearfully to convey their gratitude and congratulations. From the drawings and the gossip, they had been initially skeptical. “Is this the best they can do?” one veteran remembered thinking beforehand. Now, they were elated.
When Lin and Clay arrived at the apex, a tall, red-haired veteran, his Purple Heart pinned to his fatigue jacket, burst from the scrum and accosted her aggressively. “Why did you do such a thing?” he shrieked. “This memorial is to you, not to us!” He towered over her, his mere physical presence overwhelming and intimidating. “Why didn’t you put in a flag?” he snarled close in her face. “Why did you try to bury us?”
Deeply shaken, she cowered beneath his hulk. Clay tried to interpose himself, but the veteran was overpowering and swatted him aside, continuing his rant until, finally, three vets in green berets rescued her and told the angry assailant to cool it and get lost. It was one thing to face off in professional settings against the likes of Ross Perot or Tom Carhart in defense of her art. Or even over the past eighteen months to hear remotely the multiple personal slurs about her in the press. But this was different, deeply personal and upsetting. Had it all come down to this? Could she expect a lot more of it when the hordes gathered for the dedication? What had she unleashed? Why had she come? She left hurriedly for her hotel room, where she dissolved into sobs.
Meanwhile, at the tony Cosmos Club, near Dupont Circle where he had once protested against the war, Frederick Hart celebrated. Secure now with his handsome commission, he hosted a dinner for his boosters, Tom Carhart and Milton Copulos, to thank them for all their help. Copulos, a disabled veteran who served in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969, was drawn into the memorial movement by negative portrayals in the national media of Vietnam veterans as drug addicts, alcoholics, and wife beaters. A militant anti-Communist and a passionately anti-Lin member of the shadow “Sculpture Panel” that had conferred the prize on Hart, he had just finished writing an op-ed piece for the Washington Times calling the memorial “an effort to victimize Vietnam veterans one last time.” He began telling people that Lin’s wall would not exist in another year. He knew a group of vets who planned to blow it up. In fact, on the day before the dedication, a call came into the offices of the VVMF.
“We’re going to blow up the memorial,” the voice growled.
Robert Doubek, the executive director of the VVMF, later recalled that Carhart made a similar threat that if the Fund did not add the statue to the wall, “they’d show us what they had learned from the Viet Cong about explosives.”
The dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on November 13, 1982, was the culmination of a five-day salute to the Vietnam veteran, a week replete with seminars and musical events, full-throated renditions of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” and “America the Beautiful.” Occasionally, as wistful counterpoint, sung somewhat more softly, the strains of Pete Seeger’s song “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” could be heard, with its plaintive line, “When will they ever learn?” There were readings by actors Jimmy Stewart and Brian Dennehy. A headline event for the week was a ninety-minute concert by Mr. Las Vegas, Wayne Newton. The Washington National Cathedral held a vigil in which all the names on the wall were read straight through, taking fifty-six hours. For that somber reading, President Reagan and the First Lady stopped by for five minutes. Afterward he repeated his shop-worn lines that the fallen had died for a “just cause” and that they were asked to fight and die for a cause that their country was “unwilling to win.”
The night before Veterans Day, two inches of rain had fallen, and the morning broke cold and cloudy, in the forties with a strong wind. While the ground was soggy, the weather cleared somewhat, with a few rays of sunshine breaking through by afternoon. It was an entirely appropriate weather pattern for the spirit of the day. Mary McGrory, the crusty columnist for the Washington Post, saw shadings of gray in the dedication. The event was, she thought, worthy of Dante.
“The dark majesty of a wall [is] constructed to bear the unbearable grief and pain of the only war in our history where men who fled it were more honored than those who fought it.”
In the heat of their combat, as Ross Perot had done his best to undermine Maya Lin, the Texan baited her with the question: Didn’t she really think that the veterans would much prefer just a parade instead of her memorial, something happy and uplifting? Pondering the question later, she thought in response that “a parade would not, in the long term, help them overcome the enormous trauma of the politics of that war.” They needed both.
The grand parade down Constitution Avenue began at the National Gallery of Art on 7th Street and ended ten blocks away at the memorial. Fifteen thousand marchers—people from every state—were involved. General William Westmoreland, in a trench coat, led a company of veterans. (He was then in the midst of his $120 million lawsuit against CBS for a program alleging that he had manipulated intelligence about enemy strength before the Tet Offensive to create the false impression of progress.)
The parade had the air of a 1960s happening. Veterans dressed in various relics of their service kibitzed amiably with clapping spectators. Many had amazed looks on their faces, for they had never been applauded before. Predictably, an effigy of Jane Fonda was burned to the raucous approval of the crowd. Flags and banners of military units festooned every contingent, and there were a fair number of burly, bearded men wearing bush hats. One exuberant, disabled veteran did joyous wheelies in his wheelchair. If the flags bespoke pride and patriotism, more signs than not evinced bitterness and anger. “No More Wars. No More Lies. No more Stone Memorials” read one; “We killed. We bled. We died for worse than nothing,” read another; “57,000 killed in vain, shame, horror, deceit, treachery” read a third. This was scarcely the image of the mystical, idealized soldier of Frederick Hart’s vision, nor did these angry marchers comport with the vainglorious image of the American soldier promoted by the super patriots.
Once the parade reached the memorial, the dedication ceremony began. It featured the usual fare of patriotic speeches by dignitaries. Jan Scruggs was introduced as the biggest hero of them all, and the crowd serenaded him with the song “To Dream the Impossible Dream” from the Broadway hit, Man of La Mancha. Senator John Warner was accorded the honor of keynote speaker, after President Reagan declined the offer. Indeed, ranking members of the Reagan administration were conspicuously absent. (The highest-ranking official present was the deputy administrator of the Veterans Administration.) The US Marine Band, the president’s own, was on hand. But the veterans were the focus. This was about them and for them.
After the speeches, after the flyby of F-4 jets and Army helicopters, after the honor guard cased their trumpets and the colors were retired, the veterans swarmed the wall. There were men in tattered fatigue jackets, some with battle medals pinned to their chests, and men with hooks for hands. There were fathers with their young sons solemnly pointing to a name, as if to touch a name was to ignite a magical response, in the manner of the character ET. One curly-haired veteran was photographed, hands and forehead to the wall in an unknowable dream-like state. There were awe-struck teenagers with blank faces, walking in stunned silence, and widows and gold star mothers in white uniforms with flowers. There were a lot of hugs between old friends and strangers.
“Who were you with?” was a common question. “And what year?”
“Remember Bu Dop?” “My God! Bu Dop! Man, I’ve thought about that place. I’ve daydreamed a lot about Bu Dop.”
The sky had cleared, and the low November sun now made the reflection off the wall more vivid. Around that portion of the wall that displayed the names of the fallen from the bloodiest battles, there was a noticeable crush: the battle to recapture the city of Hue and the battle of Khe Sanh a month later, where hundreds of Americans were killed and thousands wounded before the base was abandoned as no longer strategic. In one private scene after another, the effect of the wall was evident and overwhelming. In such a moment two veterans stood in front of the panel that listed the names of those at Hue, where 1,609 American soldiers had been wounded and 216 had been killed, including an Army intelligence officer named Ronald Ray.
A veteran at the wall
“So many guys on the same day, it’s incredible,” one said in disbelief.
“What difference does it make if you find one name?” replied his friend, sweeping his hand across the wall. “Look at all of the names.” And then he collapsed on his friend’s shoulder.
“Some of them are special to you,” the other said consolingly. “Others are special to other people.” What was one to say?
There was bravado as well. There’s Richard Housh, “a real good lieutenant,” said a beefy guy. “I saw him jump up with his pump gun one time and blow away four guys coming at us. He was something else, one good lieutenant.”
The throng stretched far up the grassy knoll all the way to the tree line, and a few brave hearts had climbed trees to get a better look across the expanse. Someone left a pair of combat boots with a small American flag. It began an artifact collection that in the years since has filled a warehouse in a Washington suburb. The size of the crowd was later estimated at about 150,000.
Maya Lin stood above the apex of the wall. She was just one of the crowd now, with no special notice accorded, looking down on the thousands and pondering what she had wrought. A picture taken of her that day displayed no sense of triumph or accomplishment. If anything, her jaw seemed to be set in a mix of determination and wariness. Perhaps she feared another veteran might burst from the crowd, accost, and humiliate her yet again.
Maya Lin at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC, November 13, 1982
Because this was America, where free speech matters, there were also grumblers and naysayers, voices that were not moved by the spectacle of grieving veterans or impressed by fighter planes flying over. A group called About Face distributed flyers along the parade route with a message from a veteran: “Buttering up Vietnam veterans as ‘forgotten heroes’ is a slap in the face directed at millions in the country who resisted the war.” Meanwhile, as downtown hotels cleaned up the broken beer bottles and the cigarette burns on their lobby carpets, the Philadelphia Inquirer wondered how many alcoholics and drug addicts this war had produced. And Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post, expressed his relief that the memorial contained no equestrian statue, “no paean to heroism, no attempt to make something wonderful out of something tragic.”
“It is nice just for once to remember that wars kill kids,” he wrote.
The next day a very different throng, better dressed and better behaved, passed through the main door of the cathedral, high above the city, beneath Frederick Hart’s magnificent Ex Nihilo, for a commemorative service. Reverend Theodore H. Evans, Jr., who had been a minister at the Episcopal Congregation of Saigon in the mid-1960s, delivered the sermon. He began by remarking that this was “Remembrance Sunday” in the Anglican calendar, the Sunday closest to November 11, the end of World War I. “For us at this time in our history,” he said, “it means that we have to pull a painful memory from the recesses of our collective memories, to look at it, to understand it, to begin to reconcile it as an important and tragic part of our national life, but one with power to heal and make us whole again.”
First impressions of the memorial were duly noted in the press. These included the reaction of a refugee from Vietnam named Nguyen Ngoc Loan, who had arrived in the United States in April 1975 and who now owned a pizza parlor called Les Trois Continents in the northern Virginia town of Burke. He thought the memorial was quite beautiful. But sometime later Loan abruptly gave up his business when someone scrawled on his restaurant’s wall, “We know who you are, fucker,” and his past was revealed. Nguyen Ngoc Loan was a former general of the South Vietnam Army and police chief, famously photographed executing a Viet Cong prisoner with a pistol shot to the temple.
The dedication would become an occasion for some very fine writing. In an essay in The Nation, the irrepressible contrarian Christopher Hitchens weighed in with a characteristically entertaining brew of insight and wrong-headed cynicism. The Maya Lin design was “rather mediocre,” he groused, and one could almost hear him drawing out the syllables contemptuously in his upper-crust Oxford English. Her wall was “a travesty” delivered by jurors who were going for the “lowest common denominator.” The design could never have been satisfactory to any party, Hitchens wrote. “If it had incorporated a frieze of tiger-cages, napalm shells, air strikes accidentally blowing up American troops, officers shot by their own men, peasant casualties and Lazy Dog bombs, it would never have had a prayer.” As an Englishman whose reference was Europe, Hitchens wrote that in the first days of the Battle of the Somme in World War I, just as many men were lost as in the entire Vietnam War. He gravitated to the poem of Wilfred Owen in speaking to the pro-war enthusiasts.
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To Children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
But, in stating the obvious, Hitchens was right about one thing: the dedication “has done nothing to banish the arguments or still the controversy. This is as it should be.”
Among the best writing was that of William Broyles, Jr., then the editor-in-chief of Newsweek magazine, who had been a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam in the dire years of 1969 to 1970, when it was already clear that the war had been lost. Echoing the thoughts of Maya Lin, Broyles viewed the memorial as merely about the cost of war. It was, he wrote, a “bill of sale.”
“Our only stated objectives were meaningless bits of territory we would fight over and abandon.”
Their sole mission was to survive. Only one’s buddies mattered. Broyles had attended the reading of names at the cathedral, able to chortle over the readers’ difficulty in pronouncing tongue-twisting Polish, Polynesian, and Russian names, names that “reach deep into the heart of America.”
“To my knowledge there are no names of any sons or grandsons of the policymakers who plotted the war or the congressmen who voted the appropriations to keep it going. They weren’t there. The war divided America, most of all by driving a wedge between those who went and those who didn’t.”
And Robert Kaiser, the associate editor of the Washington Post who had covered the war from Saigon in 1969 to 1970, picked up on the theme of catharsis. Maya Lin had said you had to experience the pain and face it and only then could healing begin. But Kaiser made the distinction between individual catharsis and collective catharsis. “It would do no real honor to the Vietnam veterans to confuse their personal and deserved catharsis and the sort of genuine national catharsis we have never had,” he wrote. “The Vietnam monster has not been buried under those granite panels on the mall. It is still hiding under the rug where we stashed it years ago. … Hiding it does not disguise what the war in Vietnam really was: a terrible betrayal of the American people by their elected rulers.”
Whatever the shortcomings of the wall might be to Hitchens, Broyles, and Kaiser, to its diehard detractors, to the veterans in attendance or the millions elsewhere, or to the other millions who protested and avoided the ugly business altogether, November 13, 1982, proved that the wall worked. It had become a place of national pilgrimage for veterans and pacifists alike, therapeutic for some but not comforting for anybody. It advanced only a tentative reconciliation but never a completion or an end. If it represented a rift in the land and a rift in the generation, it was a wound that would never heal completely.
Yet, it worked on the three separate levels that counted: the emotions, the aesthetics, and the symbolism. Its very existence alone was a miracle; that it was consummated in less than four years was part of the miracle.
Poets confirmed its triumph. A Bronze Star veteran named Yusef Komunyakaa, among others, certified the triumph with his poem “Facing It.”
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.