To Heal a Nation: Creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

In this therapeutic approach, the Vietnam War itself became a "wound" upon the nation's body that needed to be healed. In April 1979, Jan C. Scruggs founded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to privately raise money for a monument to honor American war dead. Scruggs had served in the infantry, and suffered hallucinatory flashbacks after seeing The Deer Hunter . His effort soon gained support among veterans and families of fallen soldiers. In January 1980, Congress passed a bill authorizing the Memorial, and later that year, President Jimmy Carter signed it into law, adding his own prologue:

A long and painful process has brought us to this moment today. Our nation, as you all know, was divided by this war. For too long, we tried to put that division behind us by forgetting the Vietnam War and, in the process, we ignored those who bravely answered their nation's call, adding to their pain the additional burden of our nation's own inner conflict.^[16]

As Harry Haines points out, this prologue was an early indicator that the Memorial was intended to serve as a kind of therapy. Carter "names the Memorial as a sign of national expiation, a sign through which Vietnam veterans are purged of an unidentified 'inner conflict.'" After the Fund's success in getting public appropriations for construction, it then formed an eight-person jury to select a design. The judges issued instructions "that the memorial must include a list of names of the war dead, that it must relate sensitively to the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and other major monuments, and that it should be 'reflective and contemplative in nature,' refraining from making any 'political statement regarding the war or its conduct.'"

The jury received 1421 entries and in May 1981 selected Maya Lin's design. At first, the Yale undergraduate's famous black wall received approval from the National Capitol Planning Commission, the Fine Arts Commission, and the Department of the Interior. But by the fall, a conservative critique of the Memorial design had become a powerful political force. Tom Carhart, a Vietnam veteran and lawyer at the Pentagon complained, "Are we to honor our dead and our sacrifices to America with a black hole? . . . Can America truly mean that we should feel honored by that black pit?"^[17] James Webb, a Vietnam veteran, author of the novel Fields of Fire (1977), and a well-known Washington official, called the design a "wailing wall" for future anti-war protests. H. Ross Perot (who had financed the design competition) also disliked it, as did several congressmen. They all wanted an above-ground, white monument.

Secretary of the Interior James Watt subsequently refused to build the wall. Scruggs mobilized his allies among veterans and the armed services and fought back. Watt then ordered Scruggs to compromise. Frederick Hart's proposal for statues of three soldiers approaching the wall was accepted to give the Memorial a more traditional look.

In March 1982, construction began and the first of three dedication ceremonies was held. Virginia Governor Charles S. Robb, a former Marine officer and Lyndon Johnson's son-in-law, recalled that he never knew how to answer "why" his men had died when he wrote to their parents, "and this memorial doesn't attempt to say why, but it does say we cared and we remembered."^[18] Attempts to understand why the war happened were thus displaced to therapeutically heal the "wounds" it inflicted.

Later in the fall, the wall was completed and dedicated during a four-day event entitled the "National Salute to Vietnam Veterans." Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger used the occasion to generate public support for the Reagan administration's Cold War agenda. He affirmed the conservative analysis of the Vietnam War, namely that the U.S. military suffered from what the Joint Chiefs of Staff called "self-imposed restraints." The Secretary of Defense said that the United States would never again ask its men to "serve in a war that we did not intend to win."^[19] National unity would require learning that lesson before fighting another war.

But the meaning of the Memorial was not completely determined by Weinberger's speech. Different cultural forces were set in motion by the way its design framed experiences for visitors. Communications scholar Sandra Foss theorizes that the Memorial's presence within the earth, together with its enveloping walls, creates a "feminine sensibility" resonant with Jung's "Mother archetype." Visitors are warmly embraced while the inscribed names of the war dead communicate tragedy.^[20] Both Foss and

novelist Bobbie Ann Mason believe that touching the wall creates a bond between the living and the dead. Vietnam War scholar (and veteran) Rick Berg concludes that this process takes Vietnam away from the state and instead locates the war "as an experiential and historical fact in the lives of . . . families."^[21]

For Vietnam veterans, the Memorial created opportunities to break through what psychoanalyst Shatan calls "impacted grief" and mourn for their lost comrades. Armies do not encourage grieving; battle demands that soldiers keep fighting. Mourning is first blocked and then transformed into "ceremonial vengeance," the desire to make the enemy suffer.^[22] Photographs of former soldiers crying became one of the most common representations of the Memorial, and thus of the Vietnam War.

In November 1984, the Reagan administration orchestrated the third ceremonial dedication to honor Hart's statues. A week-long series of televised events called "Salute II," and subtitled "American Veterans—One and All," was held. This dedication's political objective was to consecrate the Vietnam War as a "traditional" American war. President Reagan began his speech by saying that "this memorial is a symbol of both past and current sacrifice." He concluded:

There has been much rethinking by those who did not serve, and those who did. . . . There has been much rethinking by those who had strong opinions on the war, and those who did not know which view was right. There's been rethinking on all sides, and this is good. And it's time we moved on, in unity and with resolve to always stand for freedom, as those who fought did, and to always try to protect and preserve the peace.^[23]

By implication, both the civilian and Vietnam veteran anti-war movements were wrong to protest. Healing requires unity. Unity creates the resolve to "stand for freedom" and fight another war. The "price" of freedom is periodic sacrifice of the nation's youth. Consequently, the memorial is a "symbol of both past and current sacrifice." Reagan's attempt to recuperate the Vietnam War makes new wars necessary and desirable—blood sacrifice can only be redeemed by more blood sacrifices . Without new sacrifices, then all those who have died before will have died in vain.

This concept of blood sacrifice appeared in many other commentaries during the 1980s. Tom Carhart, the lawyer who called Maya Lin's design a "black hole," had submitted his own design in which an army officer held a dead soldier up to the sky, like an ancient offering to the gods. Christopher Buckley similarly argued in Esquire that those who avoided military service had "forfeited what might have been the ultimate opportunity, in increasingly self-obsessed times, of making the ultimate commitment [self-sacrifice] to something greater than ourselves: the survival of comrades."^[24] Francis Ford Coppola's second Vietnam film, Gardens of

Stone (1987), focuses on ritual sacrifice. A noble young lieutenant is first trained by two veteran sergeants. He volunteers for Vietnam and is killed. The movie concludes with his burial at Arlington National Cemetery and the mourning of his symbolic fathers. They know that he died for them.

Some veterans foresaw that the Memorial would be used to promote the revitalization of war culture. Poet William D. Ehrhart made the connection in "The Invasion of Grenada":^[25]

I didn't want a monument,
not even one as sober as that
vast black wall of broken lives.
I didn't want a postage stamp.
I didn't want a road beside the Delaware
River with a sign proclaiming:
"Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway."

What I wanted was a simple recognition
of the limits of our power as a nation
to inflict our will on others.
What I wanted was an understanding
that the world is neither black-and-white
nor ours.

What I wanted
was an end to monuments.