This is a book about the memory of the Vietnam War and the five-year battle, from 1979 to 1984, to define that memory in the building of a memorial in Washington, DC. Initially, the effort was intended to honor those men and women who fought in the war, and by doing so, to aid in healing the wounds of a fractured nation. But the healing balm did not emerge from the ferocious fight over what manner of public art would serve the purpose. Indeed, the reverse was true. It was as if the Vietnam War was being fought all over again.
The competition for an appropriate design to commemorate America’s first national experience with a lost war was, at the time, the largest contest of its kind in the history of American or European art. The 1,421 entries represented a remarkable explosion of creativity. The surprising winner was a twenty-one-year-old Yale undergraduate named Maya Lin. But her concept of a simple, chevron-shaped black granite wall was instantly controversial. A cabal of well-connected, forceful veterans led the charge against it, denigrating the design as shameful and nihilistic, an insult to veterans and a paean to anti-war protesters. They did everything they could to scuttle the winning design and replace it with something more heroic … and they almost succeeded. When that effort failed, they did ultimately manage to impose an entirely different work of art on the winning design: a classical sculpture representing three soldiers in combat gear, fashioned by another remarkable artist, Frederick Hart.
Thus, the eventual memorial was really two memorials in one, and the “art war” featured a clash of two entirely different concepts of art—one modernist, the other traditional—while raising questions about the inviolability of an artist’s work. The process of compromise came to involve politicians at the highest level of the American government, both in the US Congress and at the White House. Art organizations and veterans’ groups also entered the fray, and the opposing positions were argued with force and passion. At several moments in the struggle, it seemed as if the contentiousness was simply too great for any memorial to be built at all. And yet, once the art war ended and the dream of a memorial was realized, it was embraced with near universal acceptance and has become a place of reflection about not only the Vietnam War but all wars.
The roots of this book reach back to my own service in the US Army (1965–1968), through the shock of losing a comrade during the Tet Offensive in January 1968. His story is told here as well. His fate could easily have been my own. Those three years as a soldier gave me a deep and abiding empathy for any soldier in harm’s way, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of the conflict. Like many soldiers of that generation, I turned against the war while I was still in the service. Afterward, perhaps by way of penance, I became deeply involved with the amnesty movement that sought relief and return for the tens of thousands who fled the United States to avoid the military draft. I probably wrote more about that issue than any other American writer, and I ended up advocating for universal amnesty in debates held all over the country.
Just as the Vietnam War memorial in Washington has transcended the specifics of the war it memorializes and ascended to the level of the universal, so the issue of reconciliation and reconstruction after a divisive war has also become timeless. Through the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond, the period of peace in a war’s aftermath will be, and should be, a time for reflection, and hopefully, for renewal. To have a permanent physical space to ponder those issues, a space that is almost sacred in feel, defines the brilliance of the Maya Lin and Frederick Hart creations. But there is also great value in revisiting the fierce struggle over divergent concepts of art and patriotism that brought their creations into existence.
In the essay accompanying her submission to the original memorial design competition, Maya Lin described her vision as a “rift in the earth.” Whether wittingly or unwittingly, that vision became a metaphor for the rift in the entire Vietnam generation. Those who came of age from 1959 to 1975 faced difficult choices. Many like my friend, Ron Ray, answered the call of their president without question as an obligation of citizenship. Others supported the war overtly, thought it was the right thing to do, and served willingly. But those who opposed the war faced an impossible moral choice: whether to serve in an ill-conceived and immoral war effort or to resist and avoid service … with all the consequences that entailed. The rift pitted soldiers against protesters, sons against fathers, citizens against politicians, friends against friends, veterans against veterans, all in the context of a war that should never have been fought and that involved terrible loss, not only of the soldiers who were killed, maimed, or driven crazy but to the moral standing of the nation before the world.