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• Sturken, Marita. “The Wall and the Screen Memory: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial.” Representations No. 35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories (Summer, 1991), 118-142.
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The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Marita Sturken
Representations, No. 35, Special Issue: Monumental Histories. (Summer, 1991), pp. 118-142.
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MARITA STURKEN
The Wall, the Screen,
and the Image: The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial
THEFORMS REMEMBRANCE TAKES indicate the status of memory
within a given culture. In these forms, we can see acts of public commemoration
as moments in which shifting discourses of history, personal memory, and cultural
memory converge. Public commemoration is a form of history-making, yet
it can also be a contested form of remembrance in which cultural memories slide
through and into each other, merging and then disengaging in a tangle of
narratives.
With the Vietnam War, discourses of public commemoration have become
inextricably tied to the question of how war is brought to a closure in American
society. How, for instance, does a society commemorate a war for which the central
narrative is one of division and dissent, a war whose history is highly contested
and still in the process of being made? As Peter Ehrenhaus writes, “The tradition
of U.S. public discourse in the wake of war is founded upon the premises of clarity
of purpose and success; when such presumptions must account for division,
equivocation, and failure, and when losing is among the greatest of sins, commemoration
seems somehow inappropriate.”‘ Yet the Vietnam War-with its division
and confusion, its lack of a singular, historical narrative defining clear-cut
purpose and outcome-has led to a very different form of commemoration.
I would like to focus this discussion of public remembrance on the notion of
a screen, in its many meanings. A screen can be a surface that is projected upon;
it is also an object that hides something from view, that shelters or protects. It can
be a surface, or even a body-in military language a screen is a “body of men” who
are used to cover the movements of an army. Freud’s screen memory functions
to hide highly emotional material, which the screen memory conceals while
offering itself as a substitute. The kinds of screens that converge in the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., both shield and project: the black walls
of the memorial act as screens for innumerable projections of memory and history-
of the United States’ participation in the Vietnam War and of the experience
of the Vietnam veterans since the war-while they screen out the narrative
of defeat in preparing for wars to come. Seeing the memorial as a screen also
evokes the screens on which the war was and continues to be experienced-<in-
118 REPRESEXTATION35S Summer 1991 0THE REGENTS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
ematic and television screens-through which the contested history of the war is
being made.
Cultural memory represents the many shifting histories and shared memories
that exist between a sanctioned narrative of history and personal memory.
The formation of a singular, sanctioned history of the Vietnam War has not yet
taken place, in part because of the disruption of the standard narratives of American
imperialism, technology, and masculinity that the war’s loss represented.’
The history of the Vietnam War is still in the process of being composed from
many conflicting histories, yet there are particular elements within these often
opposing narratives that remain uncontested-the irony of the war, the pain and
subsequent marginalization of the Vietnam veteran, and the divisive effect the
war had on American society. This essay is concerned with how certain narratives
of the war have been constructed out of and within the fluid realm of cultural
memory, in which personal memories are shared for many different purposes. I
would like to examine how the screens of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial act to
eclipse personal and collective memories of the war from the design of history,
and yet how the textures of cultural and personal memory are nevertheless woven
throughout, perhaps over and under, these screens.
The 1980s and 1990s have witnessed a repackaging of the 1960s and the
Vietnam War-a phenomenon that is steeped in the language of nostalgia,
healing, and forgiveness. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has become a central
icon of the “healing” process of confronting difficult past experiences, and it has
played a significant role in the historization and rehistorization of the war. Since
its construction in 1982, the memorial has been the center of a debate on precisely
how wars should be remembered, and precisely who should be remembered in a
war-those who died, those who participated, those who engineered it, or those
who opposed it.
The Status of a Memorial
Although administered under the aegis of the National Parks Service
of the Federal Government, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built in 1982
through the impetus of a group of Vietnam veterans, the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial Fund (VVMF), who raised the necessary funds and negotiated for a
site on the Mall in Washington. Situated on the grassy slope of the Constitutional
Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial, the memorial consists of two walls of black
granite set into the earth at an angle of 125 degrees. Together, the walls form an
extended V almost 500 feet in length, tapering in both directions from a height
of approximately ten feet at the central hinge. These walls are currently inscribed
with 58,132 names of men and women who died in the war, as well as with
opening and closing inscriptions. The chronological listing of names begins on
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 119
the right-hand side of the hinge and continues to the end of the right wall; it then
begins again at the far end of the left wall and continues to the center again. Thus,
the name of the first American soldier killed in Vietnam in 1959 is on a panel
adjacent to that containing the name of the last American killed in 1975. The
framing dates of 1959 and 1975 are the only dates listed on the wall; the names
are listed alphabetically within each “casualty day,” although those dates are not
noted.” Eight of the names on the wall represent women who died in the war.
Since 1984, the memorial has been accompanied by a figurative sculpture of three
soldiers and a flag, both facing the monument from a group of trees at a distance
of about thirty yards.
The memorial stands in opposition to the codes of remembrance evidenced
on the Washington Mall. Virtually all of the national memorials and monuments
in Washington are made of white stone and are constructed to be seen from a
distance. In contrast, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial cuts into the sloping earth:
it is not visible until one is almost upon it, and if approached from behind, it
seems to disappear into the landscape. While the polished black granite walls of
the memorial reflect the Washington Monument and face the Lincoln Memorial,
they are not visible from the base of either of those structures. The black stone
gives the memorial a reflective surface (one that echoes the reflecting pool of the
Lincoln Memorial) that allows viewers to participate in the memorial; seeing their
own images in the names, they are thus implicated in the listing of the dead.
As a memorial, rather than a monument, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is
situated within a particular code of remembrance, one that Arthur Danto evokes:
“We erect monuments so that we shall always remember, and build memorials so
that we shall never f ~ r g e t . “M~o numents are not generally built to commemorate
defeats; the defeated dead are remembered in memorials. While a monument
most often signifies victory, a memorial refers to the life or lives sacrificed for a
particular set of values. Memorials embody grief, loss, and tribute or obligation;
in so doing, they serve to frame particular historical narratives. They are,
according to Charles Griswold, “a species of pedagogy [that] seeks to instruct
posterity about the past and, in so doing, necessarily reaches a decision about
what is worth rec~vering.”~
Thus, whatever triumph a particular memorial refers to, its depiction of victory
is always tempered by a foregrounding of the lives lost. The Lincoln Memorial
is a funereal structure that connotes a mausoleum, embodying the man and
his philosophy in privileging his words on its walls. The force of the Lincoln
Memorial is thus its mythical reference to Lincoln’s untimely death. The Washington
Monument, on the other hand, operates purely as a symbol, making no
reference beyond its name to the mythic political figure. This contrast outlines
one of the fundamental differences between memorials and monuments: monuments
tend to use less explanation, while memorials tend to emphasize texts or
lists of the dead. Therefore, while monuments (and victories) are usually anonymous,
the irony of lives lost for an unattained goal-in the case of the Vietnam
War, an unspoken goal in an undeclared war-in a memorial seems to demand
the naming of the indi~idual.~
The traditional Western monument glorifies not only its subject but architectural
history as well. The obelisk of the Washington Monument, which was
erected from 1848 to 1885, has its roots in Roman architecture; long before
Napoleon pilfered them from Egypt to take to Paris, obelisks carried connotations
of the imperial trophy. The Lincoln Memorial, which was built in 1922, is modeled
on the classic Greek temple, specifically referring to the Parthenon. The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, however, makes no direct reference to the classical
history of art or architecture. As a blank slate, it does not chart a lineage from the
accomplishments of past civilizations.
Yet the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is unmistakably representative of a particular
period in Western art. In the uproar that accompanied its construction, it
became the focus of a debate about the role of modernism in public sculpture.
Just one month prior to the dedication of the memorial in November 1982, Tom
Wolfe wrote a vitriolic attack on its design in the Washington Post, calling it a piece
of modernist orthodoxy that was “a tribute to Jane F ~ n d a . “W~o lfe and other
critics of modernism compared the memorial to two infamously unpopular
government-funded public sculptures: Carl Andre’s Stone Field Sculpture (1980) in
Hartford, Connecticut, and Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981) in downtown Manhattan?
These two works had come to symbolize the alienating effect of modern
sculpture on certain sectors of the viewing public, leading to questions by those
viewers about the ways they felt tax-funded public sculptures were being imposed
on them.
Before it was built, the memorial was seen by many veterans and critics of
modernism as yet another abstract modernist work that the public would find
difficult to interpret. Yet in situating the Vietnam Veterans Memorial purely
within the context of modernism, Wolfe and his fellow critics ignore fundamental
aspects of this work. The memorial is not simply a flat, black, abstract wall; it is a
wall inscribed with names. When the “public” visits this memorial, they do not go
to see long walls cut into the earth but to see the names of those whose lives were
lost in the war. Hence, to call this a modernist work is to privilege a formalist
reading of its design and to negate its commemorative and textual functions.
While modernism in sculpture has been defined as a kind of “sitelessness,”~he
memorial is specifically situated within the national context of the Mall. Deliberately
counterposed to the dominant monumental styles surrounding it, the
memorial refers to, absorbs, and reflects the classical forms of the Mall. The black
walls mirror not only the faces of viewers and passing clouds but also the Washington
obelisk, thus forming an impromptu pastiche of monuments. The memorial’s
relationship to the earth shifts between a sitelessness and site specificity,
between context and decontextualization. It delicately balances between effacing
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 121
and embracing the earth-it cuts into the earth, yet strikes a harmony with the
terrain.
But it is as a war memorial that the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is most
importantly different from modernist sculpture. The first national memorial to
an American war built since World War I1 memorials, it makes a statement on
war that diverges sharply from the traditional declarations of prior war memorials.
The Vietnam veterans who organized the construction of the memorial stipulated
only two things for its design-that it contain the names of those who died
or are missing in action and that it be apolitical and harmonious with the site.
Implicit within these guidelines was also a desire that the memorial offer some
kind of closure to the debates on the war. Even so, in these stipulations the veterans
had already set the stage for the dramatic disparity between the message of
this memorial and that of its antecedents. While the concern for the memorial’s
context in the Mall tended to rule out a vertical monument, the intent that the
work not espouse a political stand in regard to the war ensured that in the end
the memorial would not glorify the war.
The traditional war memorial works to impose a closure on a specific conflict.
This closure contains the war within particular master narratives either of victory-
in this country, affirming our military superiority and ability to impose our
will on others-or of loss and the bitter price of victory, a theme dominant in the
“never again” texts of World War I memorials. In declaring the end of a conflict,
this closure can by its very nature serve to sanctify future wars by offering a completed
narrative with cause and effect intact. In rejecting the architectural lineage
of monuments and contesting the aesthetic codes of previous war memorials, the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial also refuses the closure and implied tradition of
those structures; yet it both condemns and justifies future memorials.
The Black Gash of Shame
Before it was built, the design of the memorial was an object of attack
not only because of its modernist aesthetics but, more significantly, because it
violated implicit taboos about the remembrance of wars. When its design was first
unveiled, the memorial was condemned by some veterans and others as a highly
political statement about the shame of an unvictorious war. Termed the “black
gash of shame,” a “degrading ditch,” a “black spot in American history,” a “tombstone,”
a “slap in the face,” and a “wailing wall for draft dodgers and New Lefters
of the future,”1° the memorial was seen as a monument to defeat, one that spoke
more directly to a nation’s guilt than to the honor of the war dead and the veterans.
One prominent veteran of the VVMF read its black walls as evoking
“shame, sorrow, and the degradation of all races”; l 1 others perceived its refusal
to rise above the earth as indicative of defeat. Thus, a racist reading of the color
black was combined with a sexist reading of a feminized earth as connoting a lack
of power. Precisely because of its deviation from traditional commemorative
codes-white stone rising above the earth-the design was read as a political
statement. An editorial in the iVutional Review stated:
Our objection . . . is based upon the clear political message of this design. The design says
that the Vietnam War should be memorialized in black, not the white marble of Washington.
The mode of listing the names makes them individual deaths, not deaths in a cause:
they might as well have been traffic accidents. The invisibility of the monument at ground
level symbolizes the “unmentionability” of the war. . . . Finally, the V-shaped plan of the
black retaining wall immortalizes the antiwar signal, the V protest made with the fingers!”
This analysis of the memorial’s symbolism, indeed a perceptive reading, points
to several crucial aspects of the memorial: its listing of names does make these
individual deaths rather than the singular death of a body of men; the relationship
of the memorial to the earth does refuse to evoke heroism and victory.
Certainly the angry reactions to the memorial go beyond the accusation of
the elite pretensions of abstraction, since the uncontroversial Washington Monument
itself is the epitome of abstraction. Rather, I believe that the primary (and
unspoken) aspect of the memorial that is responsible for the accusations that it
does not appropriately remember war is its antiphallic presence. By “antiphallic”
I do not mean to imply that the memorial is somehow a passive or “feminine”
form but rather that it opposes the codes of vertical monuments symbolizing
power and honor. The memorial does not stand erect above the landscape; it is
continuous with the earth. It evokes contemplation rather than declaring its
meaning. The intersection of the two walls of the memorial form the shape of a
V, which has been interpreted by various commentators as V for Vietnam, vzctim,
victory, veteran, violate, and valor. Yet, one also finds here a disconcerting subtext
in which the memorial implicitly evokes castration. The V of the two black granite
walls has also been read as a female V, reminding us that a “gash” is not only a
wound but slang for the female genitals. The memorial contains all elements that
have been associated psychoanalytically with the specter of woman-it embraces
the earth; it is the abyss; it is death. To its critics this antiphallus symbolizes the
open, castrated wound of this country’s venture into an unsuccessful war, a war
that emasculated the role the United States would play in future foreign conflicts.
The discourse of healing surrounding the memorial is an attempt to close many
wounds, the suturing of which would mean a revived metanarrative of the United
States as a successful military power and a rehabilitation of the masculinity of the
American soldier.
The controversial, antiphallic form of the memorial is attributable to its
having been designed by a person unlikely to reiterate traditional codes of war
remembrance. At the time her design was chosen anonymously by a group of
eight male “experts,” Maya Ying Lin was a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate at
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 123
Yale University who had produced the design for a funerary architecture course.
She was not only young and uncredentialed but Chinese-American and, most
significantly, female. Initially, the veterans of the VVMF were pleased by this turn
of events; they assumed that the selection of Lin’s design would only show how
open and anonymous their design contest had been. However, the selection of
someone with “marginal” cultural status as the primary interpreter of a controversial
war inevitably complicated matters. Eventually, Maya Lin was defined, in
particular by the media, not as American but as “other.” This “otherness” became
an issue not only in the way she was perceived in the media and by some of the
veterans; it became a critical issue of whether or not that otherness had informed
the design itself. For architecture critic Michael Sorkin, “Perhaps it was Maya Lin’s
‘otherness’ that enabled her to create such a moving work. Perhaps only an outsider
could have designed an environment so successful in answering the need
for recognition by a group of people-the Vietnam vets-who are plagued by a
sense of ‘otherness’ forced on them by a country that has spent ten years pretending
not to see them.”13 Lin’s marginal status as a Chinese-American woman
was thus seen as giving her insight into the marginal status experienced by
Vietnam veterans, in a move that noticeably erased other differences.
Debates about Lin’s design have also centered on the question of whether or
not it is a passive work that reflects a female sensibility. There is little doubt that
it is, in its refusal to glorify war, an implicitly pacifist work, and by extension a
political work. As art critic Elizabeth Hess wrote, “Facing the myriad names, it is
difficult for anyone not to question the purpose of the war” (269).Yet as much as
this is a contemplative work that is continuous with the earth, it is also a violent
work that cuts into the earth, evoking a wrenching in flesh. Lin has said,
I wanted to work with the land and not dominate it. I had an impulse to cut open the earth
. . . an initial violence that in time would heal. The grass would grow back, but the cut
would remain, a pure, flat surface, like a geode when you cut into it and polish the edge?4
The black walls cannot connote a healing wound without signifying the violence
which created that wound, cutting into the earth and splitting it open.
Trouble between Maya Lin and the veterans began almost immediately. “The
fund has always seen me as a female-as a child,” she has said. “I went in there
when I first won and their attitude was-O.K. you did a good job, but now we’re
going to hire some big boys-boys-to take care of it.”15 Lin was defined, primarily
because of her sex and age, as outside of the veterans’ discourse. She had
also made a decision deliberately not to inform herself about the war’s political
history to avoid being influenced by debates about the war. According to veteran
Jan Scruggs, the primary figure behind the memorial’s construction, “She never
asked, ‘What was combat like?’ or ‘Who were your friends whose names we’re
putting on the wall?’ And the vets, in turn, never once explained to her what the
words like ‘courage,’ ‘sacrifice,’ and ‘devotion to duty’ really meant” (79).That Lin
could not understand terms such as “courage” and “sacrifice” was implicit to the
veterans because she was a woman and hence positioned outside of the (male)
discourse of war.
In public discourse, Lin’s Asian-American identity was read as particularly
ironic by virtue of her role in defining the discourse of remembrance of a war
fought in Indochina-even if, given the complex politics between China and
Vietnam, this conflation of ethnic identities is a particularly American one. (Further,
while Lin’s ethnicity seemed appropriate to some in that Asians had suffered
most in the war, it also appeared as a supreme irony in a war now considered
remarkable for its racism.) Hence, Lin’s status as American disappeared and she
became simply “Asian.” Conversely, Lin stuck to her position as an outsider in
consistently referring to “the integrity of my design,” while the veterans were
primarily concerned with the ability of the design to offer emotional comfort to
veterans and the families of the dead, either in terms of forgiveness or honor.
The initial disagreements on design between the veterans and Lin, which ultimately
led to several compromises-the veterans agreed to the chronological
listing, with indexes at the site to facilitate location, and Lin agreed to the addition
of an opening and closing inscription-were hence concerned not so much with
aesthetics as about to whom the memorial ultimately belonged.
In the larger political arena, these aesthetic and commemorative discourses
were also at play. The initial response to Lin’s design was so divided that it eventually
became clear to the veterans of the Memorial Fund that they had either to
compromise or to postpone the construction of the memorial (which was to be
ready by Veterans Day, November 1982). Consequently, a plan was devised to
erect an alternative statue and flag close to the walls of the memorial, and realist
sculptor Frederick Hart was chosen to design it.Ib Hart’s bronze sculpture, placed
in a grove of trees near the memorial in 1984, consists of three soldiers-one
black and two white-standing and looking in the general direction of the wall.
Their military garb is realistically rendered, with guns slung over their shoulders
and ammunition around their waists, and their expressions are somewhat bewildered
and puzzled. One of the most vociferous critics of modernism in the
debates over the memorial, Hart said at the time,
My position is humanist, not militarist. I’m not trying to say there was anything good or
bad about the war. I researched for three years-read everything.I became close friends
with many vets, drank with them in bars. Lin’s piece is a serene exercise in contemporary
art done in a vacuum with no knowledge of its subject. It’s nihilistic-that’s its appeal.”
Hart bases his credentials on a kind of “knowledge” strictly within the male
domain-drinking with the veterans in a bar-and unavailable to Maya Lin,
whom he had on another occasion referred to as “a mere student.” Lin is characterized
by Hart as having designed her work with no “knowledge” and no
“research,” as a woman who works with feeling and intuition rather than exper-
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 125
tise. Hart’s statement ultimately defines realism as not only a male privilege but
also an aesthetic necessity in remembering war. Hart’s sculpture does not call into
question how suitably to honor the individual dead, because in this work the veterans
and the dead are subsumed into a singular narrative. It thus follows in the
tradition of the Marine Corps War Memorial depicting the raising of the American
flag at Iwo Jima, a work that has attained an iconic status as the realist war
memorial and a symbol of the United States’ right to raise its flag on foreign soil.18
The battle over what kind of style best represents the war was, quite obviously,
a battle over the representation of the war itself. Hence, in choosing an “apolitical”
memorial, the veterans of the VVMF had attempted to separate the memorial,
itself a contested narrative, from the contested narratives of the war,
ultimately an impossible task. However, after the memorial had actually been
built, the debate about aesthetics and remembrance surrounding its design
simply disappeared. That controversy was replaced by a multiplicity of cultural
discourses on remembrance and healing. Even Maya Lin, who had not attended
the opening ceremonies, positioned herself at this point as just another viewer
experiencing the memorial like everyone else.'”he experience of Lin’s work
seems to have been so powerful for those who have visited it that negative criticism
of its design has vanished.”
The Names
There is little doubt that much of the memorial’s power is due to the
effect of the 58,132 names inscribed on its walls. Unlike the singular narrative
and totalizing image presented by realist sculptures like the Marine Corps Memorial
and Hart’s statue, images that exist as confirmations of official history, these
names, by virtue of their multiplicity, situate the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
within the multiple strands of cultural memory spawned by the individual names.
The most commonly noted response of visitors at the memorial has been to think
of the widening circle of pain emanating from each name-to imagine for each
name the grieving parents, sisters, brothers, girlfriends, wives, and children; to
imagine, in effect, the multitude of people who were directly affected by the war.
This listing of names creates an expanse of cultural memory, one that could
be seen as alternately subverting, rescripting, and contributing to the history of
the Vietnam War as it is currently being written. The histories evoked by these
names and the responses to them are necessarily multiple and replete with complex
personal stakes. These narratives are concerned with the effect of the war
on those who survived it, whose lives were irrevocably altered by it. The listing of
names is steeped in the irony of the war-an irony afforded by retrospect, the
irony of lives lost for no discernable reason.
While these names are marked within an official history, that history cannot
contain the ever-widening circles that expand outward from each name. The
names on the walls of the memorial comprise a chant of the war dead (they were,
in fact, read out loud at the dedication ceremony as a roll call). They are etched
into stone, creating a negative space. The men and women who died in the war
thus achieve an historically coded presence through their absence. These names
are listed without elaboration, with no place or date of death, no rank, no place
of origin. The lack of military rank allows the names to emerge from a military
narrative and to represent the names of a society. It has often been noted that
these names display the diversity of American culture: Fredes Mendez-Ortiz, Stephen
Boryszewski, Bobby Joe Yewell, Leroy Wright. Veteran William Broyles, Jr.,
writes,
These are names which reach deep into the heart of America, each testimony to a family’s
decision, sometime in the past, to wrench itself from home and culture to test our country’s
promise of new opportunities and a better life. They are names drawn from the farthest
corners of the world and then, in this generation, sent to another distant corner in a war
America has done its best to forget?’
Broyles is not atypical here, either in his seeing the diversity of names as indicative
of American society as the promised land, or in his putting the United States at
the center from which these places of cultural origins and foreign wars are seen
as “distant corners.” His reading of the ethnicity of the names on the walls does
not consider the imbalances of their ethnic distribution-that this was a war
fought by a disproportionately high number of blacks and Hispanics, that it was
a war in which the predominant number of soldiers were from working- and
middle-class backgrounds. Proper names in our culture have complex legal and
patriarchal implications, identifying individuals specifically as members of
society. On this memorial, these names are coded as American-not as Asian,
black, or white-in a way that Maya Lin could not be. The ethnicity of these
names is subsumed into a narrative of the American melting pot, into which Maya
Lin, as an agent of commemoration, will not fit.
It is crucial to their effect that these names are listed not alphabetically but in
chronological order. This was Maya Lin’s original intent, so that the wall would
read “like an epic Greek poem” and “return the vets to the time frame of the war.”
The veterans were originally opposed to this idea; since they conceived the
memorial specifically in terms of the needs of the veterans and family members
who would visit it, they were worried that people would be unable to locate a name
and simply leave in frustration. They wanted the names to be in alphabetical
order to facilitate their location. They were swayed in their opinion, however,
when they examined the Defense Department listing of casualties. Listed alphabetically,
the names presented not individuals but cultural entities. There were
over six hundred people named Smith, and sixteen named James Jones. Read
alphabetically, the names became anonymous statistics.
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 127
The chronological listing of names on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial provides
it with a narrative framework. Read chronologically, the names chart the
story of the war. As the number of names listed alphabetically within a casualty
day swells, the intensity of the fighting is told. As one walks along the wall, one
can conceivably walk through the history of the war; Lin and others have referred
to it as a “journey.” The chronological listing thus provides the veterans with a
spatial reference for their experience of the war, a kind of memory map. They
can see in certain clumps of names the scene of a particular ambush, the casualties
of a doomed night patrol, or the night they were wounded.
This is not a linear narrative framework. Rather, the names form a loop,
beginning as they do at the central hinge of the memorial and moving out on the
right wall, then continuing at the far end of the left wall and moving toward the
center. They thus form a narrative circle, in which one can read from the last
name to the first. This refusal of linearity is, in many ways, appropriate to a conflict
that has had no superficial closure. The hinge between the two walls thus
becomes a pivotal space, the narrow space between the end and the beginning of
a war; it connotes peace, yet a temporary peace between wars.
The question of who are and are not named on the wall is crucial within the
memorial’s representation of intersecting discourses of cultural memory and history.
The veterans of the VVMF were concerned that the memorial be a tribute
not only to those who died but to those who survived the war. There is little doubt
that the memorial has become a powerful symbol for all Vietnam veterans, yet
only the names of the war dead and the MIAs are inscribed on the wall, and thus
within history. The distinction of the named and unnamed is thus significant for
the intersection of memory and history in the memorial-in particular, for how
this memorial will construct the history of the Vietnam War after the generation
of surviving Vietnam veterans is dead. These veterans, and those whose lives were
altered through their opposition to the war, are not named. Significantly, the
Vietnamese are conspicuously absent in their roles either as victims, enemies, or
even the people on whose land and for whom this war was ostensibly fought.
The inscription of names on the memorial has posed many taxonomic problems.
While the VVMF spent months cross-checking and verifying statistics, there
have been errors in the naming. There are at least fourteen and possibly as many
as thirty-eight men who are still alive whose names are inscribed on the wall.”
How can this be resolved? To erase the names would leave a scar in the wall; if
the names are etched out, these veterans will be categorized as the not-dead,
doubly displaced within the war discourse. There have been several hundred
names added to the memorial since it was first built (the initial number inscribed
on the walls was 57,939),names that were held up previously for “technicalities”
(including, in one case, a dispute over whether or not the men were killed in the
“presidentially designated” war zone), their status now changed from “missing”
or “lost” to classifiably dead.
The problems raised by the inscription of names on the memorial signifies,
in many ways, the war’s lack of closure. The unmanageability of 58,000 sets of
statistics, the impossibility of knowing every detail (who died, when and where)
in a war in which remains were often unidentifiable, prevents any kind of closure.’
Wames will continue to be added to the memorial; there is no definitive
end to the addition of names. There has been considerable discussion of the fact
that the names of the veterans who have died since the war (from causes stemming
from it) are not included on the memorial-veterans who committed suicide,
who died from complications from their exposure to Agent Orange. Are
they not casualties of the war? The battles still being fought by the veterans foreclose
any ending to the narrative of the Vietnam War.
The Vietnam Veteran:
The Perennial Soldier
Wzth the [Fzrst] World Wa? a p~ocess began to become uppalent whzch has not halted
sz?lce then Was zt ?lot notzceable at the end of the wa? that men ?etu?ned from the
battlefield g ~ o w nsz lent-?lot rzchel but poolel zn communzcable e~pelzence?W hat ten
>ea?s late? was pouled out zn the flood of wa? books was aqthzng but expe~zence that
goes mouth to mouth And t h e ~ ew as nothzng g.ema?kable about that Fol never has
e~perzenceb een contradzcted rnore thorough13 than strategzc e~pe~z encbej tactzcal
wafare, economzc e~pe~z encbej znfitzon, bodzly experience 6) rnechanzcal warfala,
rnoral experzence bj those zn pouler A generatzon that had gone to school on a horsedrawn
streetcar now stood under the open skj zn a countrjszde zn whzch nothzng
remazned unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, zn a fzeld of fo?ce of
destluctzve tolrents and exploszons, was the tznj, jlagzle, hurnan bod)
–Walter BenjaminJ4
The incommunicability of the experience of the Vietnam War has been
a primary narrative in the Vietnam veterans’ discourse. It was precisely this incommunicability
that rendered, among other things, the construction of the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial necessary. This incommunicability has been depicted as a
silence rendered by an inconceivable kind of war, a war that fit no prior images
of war.
While the Vietnam Veterans Memorial most obviously pays tribute to the
memory of those who died during the war, it is a central icon for the veterans. It
has been noted that the memorial has given them a place-one that recognizes
their identities, a place at which to congregate and from which to speak. Hence,
the memorial is as much about survival as it is about mourning the dead.
The construction of an identity for the veterans since their return from the
war has become the most present and continuing narrative of the memorial. The
central theme of this narrative is the way the veterans had been invisible and
without voice before the memorial’s construction and the subsequent interest in
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 129
discussing the war. Veterans have told innumerable stories of the hostility that
greeted them upon their return from Vietnam, and there has been a noticeable
lack of interest in the war in popular culture until recently-the direct result of
an ambivalence toward the war due to an inability to fit it into traditional paradigms.
The experience of the Vietnam War as different from all previous ones has
made the process of narrativizing it particularly difficult.
Unlike World War I1 veterans, Vietnam veterans did not arrive home en
masse for a celebration but one by one, without any welcome. Many of them
ended up in underfunded and poorly staffed Veterans Administration hospitals.
They were expected to put their war experiences behind them and to assimilate
quickly back into society. That many were unable to do so resulted further in
their marginalization-they were labeled social misfits and stereotyped as potentially
dangerous men with a violence that threatened to erupt at any moment.
According to George Swiers, a veteran,
The message sent from national leadership and embraced by the public was clear: Vietnam
veterans were malcontents, liars, wackos, losers. Hollywood, ever bizarre in its efforts to
mirror life, discovered a marketable villain. Kojak, Ironside, and the friendly folks at Hawaii
Five-0 confronted crazed, heroin-addicted veterans with the regularity and enthusiasm
Saturday morning heroes once dispensed with godless red savages. No grade-B melodrama
was complete without its standard vet-a psychotic, axe-wielding rapist every bit as
insulting as another one-time creature of Hollywood’s imagination, the shiftless, lazy, and
wide-eyed black.25
The portrayal of the veteran as a psychopath was a kind of scapegoating that
absolved the American public of complicity and allowed the master narrative of
American military power to stand. For Thomas Myers, “To ask the veteran to play
the villain is a way to quiet a loud memory, to rewrite a new national narrative so
that it can be joined, without disturbance, to older ones.”26 Implied within these
conflicting narratives is the question of whether or not the veterans are to be
perceived as victims or complicit with the war: “Vets are in an ambiguous situation-
they were the agents and the victims of a particular kind of violence. That
is the source of a pain that almost no one else can understand,” writes Peter
MarinF7 Ironically, the attempt to make them silent-in effect, to make them
disappear-has resulted in the Vietnam veterans’ assumption of hybrid roles;
they are both, yet neither, soldiers and civilians. At their demonstrations, many
wear fatigues and comport the trappings of their status as soldiers.
While the marginalization of the Vietnam veterans has been acknowledged
in the current discourse of healing and forgiveness about the war, within the
veterans’ community another group is struggling against an imposed silence: the
women veterans. There were eight women military nurses and three women Red
Cross workers killed in Vietnam. It is estimated that 7,500 military women and
an almost equal number of civilian women (many of whom were nurses) served
in Vietnam.’8 Upon their return, these women were not only subject to the same
difficulties as the veterans but were also excluded from the veteran community.
Several have since revealed how they kept their war experience a secret, never
telling even their husbands that they had been in Vietnam. One has since
recounted how she was not allowed to participate in a veterans’ protest march
because male veterans thought that “Nixon and the network news reporters
might think we’re swelling the ranks with non-vets.”‘”
These women veterans were thus doubly displaced, unable to speak as veterans
or as women. Several are presently raising funds to place an intentionally
“apolitical” statue of a woman near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In August
1990, a design competition for the memorial, to be located just south of the wall,
was announced, and the fundraising of the $3.5 million to construct the memorial
continues?’ The two women who direct the Vietnam Womens Memorial Project,
Diane Evans and Donna Marie Boulay, told Elizabeth Hess that it is Hart’s depiction
of three men who make the absence of women so visible; they would not have
initiated the project had Lin’s memorial stood alone?’
This double displacement of the women veterans is related to a larger discourse
concerning masculine identity in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War is
seen as a site where American masculinity was lost, and the rehabilitation of the
Vietnam veteran is thus heavily coded as a reinscription of American masculinity?”
ecause they were denied the traditional praise afforded veterans,
Vietnam veterans have a particularly complex collective identity-one that ironically
has been strengthened by their marginalization. The pain and suffering that
they experienced since the war continues to be read as masculine, and the inclusion
of women into that discourse of remorse and anger is seen as a dilution of
its intensity and a threat to the rehabilitation of that rna~culinity.3~
The primary narrative of the veterans in the discourses surrounding the
memorial is not their war experience but their mistreatment since the war. This
narrative takes the form of a combat story in which the enemy has been transposed
from the North Vietnamese to the antiwar movement to the callous American
people, the Veterans Administration, and the government.
The story of the struggle to build the memorial also takes on this combat
form. In his book To Heal a Nation (later a TV movie), veteran Jan Scruggs, who
conceived the memorial and was the main force behind its being built, equates
the battle waged by the veterans to have the memorial built by Veterans Day, 1982,
with the battles of Vietnam: “Some 58,000 GIs were, in death, what they had been
in life: pawns of Washington politics” (93). Scruggs is the lone fighter for much
of this story (the idea of building a memorial when veterans did not have adequate
support services was initially thought ludicrous by many veterans), and his
determination becomes exemplary for all veterans. In his story, “grunts”-those
who experienced the “real” war of combat-battle the establishment and win.
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 131
There is a powerful kind of closure here. The one story for which the memorial
appears to offer resolution is that of the shame felt by veterans for having fought
in an unpopular war.
One has to question the sudden rush to welcome home veterans ten years
after the war had ended, the clamoring of the media to cover the fallout of the
Vietnam War after ignoring it for years. While the closure for the veterans of
their period of estrangement seems not only just but long overdue, its implications
when transferred into mainstream discourse about the memorial, and into
history, can become insidious. When, for instance, Newsweek printed a story entitled
“Honoring Vietnam Veterans-At Last” in 1982,the desire not only to rectify
but to forget the mistreatment of the veterans was obvious. To forget this episode
in American history is not only to negate the ongoing struggles of veteransthose
who are ill or dying due to their exposure to Agent Orange, for examplebut
also to cease to examine the reasons why these men and women had been
scapegoated. This denial, in turn, is irrevocably tied to the question of the rupture
in public commemoration caused by the Vietnam War’s difference from other
wars, and the possible lessons to be learned from it.
The Healing Wound
The metaphor of the healing wound that has prevailed in descriptions
of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and its effect is a bodily metaphor. It evokes
many different bodies-the bodies of the Vietnam War dead, the bodies of the
veterans, and the body of the American public. The memorial is seen as representing
a wound in the process of healing, one that will leave a smooth scar in the
earth. This wound in turn represents the process of memory; its healing is the
process of remembering and commemorating the war. To dismember is to fragment
a body and its memory; to remember is to make a body complete.
In war, the “tiny, fragile, human body” becomes subject to dismemberment,
to a kind of “antimemory.” The absence of these bodies-obliterated, enterredis
both eclipsed and invoked by the names on the memorial’s walls. The names
act as surrogates for the bodies (Lin says that she conceptualizes the dead as being
in a space behind the wall). Yet the bodies of the living Vietnam veterans have not
been erased of memory. Rather, they embody personal and cultural memory;
their bodies are those of survivors. History has a problematic relationship to the
lived body of the individual who participated in it; in fact, it operates more efficiently
when survivors are no longer alive. These veterans’ bodies-dressed in
fatigues, scarred and disabled, contaminated by toxins-refuse to let historical
narratives of completion ~ t a n d .M” ~e mories of the war have been deeply encoded
in them, marked literally and figuratively in their flesh-one of the most tragic
aftermaths of the war is the genetic deformities that Agent Orange has caused in
veterans’ children.
If the bodies of the surviving veterans resist the closure of history, they provide
a perceptible site for a continual remembering of the war’s effect. Elaine
Scarry describes how wounded casualties function as vehicles for memorialization,
noting that the act of injuring is not only “the means by which a winner and
loser are arrived at” but a “means of providing a record of its own activity” (emphasis
The wound gives evidence of the act of injuring, for Scarry the primary
object of war.
The veterans’ healing process has involved the closure of individual and collective
narratives of the war. But when the healing process is ascribed to a nation,
the effect is to efface the individual bodies also involved in that process. When a
nation heals a wound, the wounds of individuals are subsumed in its healing.
Scarry writes that the common metaphor of an army as a single body works to
deny the body of the individual soldier. Yet the soldier’s body that Scarry describes
is the wounded body of the conventional army-the army of fronts, rears, flanks,
and arteries. In the Vietnam War the army was not, from the beginning, a whole
body but a body of confused signals, of infiltrated bases, mistaken identities and
a confusion of allies and enemy. In this already fragmented body, remembering
(that is, the wholeness of the body) is highly ~roblematic.~~
The Memorial as Shrine
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been the subject of an extraordinary
outpouring of sentiment since it was built. Over 150,000 people attended
its dedication ceremony, and some days as many as 20,000 people walk by its walls.
It is presently the most visited site on the Washington Mall. The memorial has
taken on all of the trappings of a religious shrine-people bring personal artifacts
to leave at the wall as offerings; coffee-table books of photography document the
experiences of visitors as representing a collective recovery from the war. It has
also spawned the design or construction of at least 150 other memorials,
including the women veterans’ memorial and a memorial to the veterans of the
Korean
This rush to embrace the memorial as a cultural symbol reveals not only the
relief of voicing a history that has been taboo but also a desire to reinscribe that
history. The black granite walls of the memorial act as a screen for myriad cultural
projections; as a site for contemplation, it is easily appropriated for diverse interpretations
of the war and of the experience of those who died in it. To the veterans,
the wall is an atonement for their treatment since the war; to the families
and friends of those who died, it is an official recognition of their sorrow and an
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 133
FIGURE 1. Memorial items left at the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial. Photo: Wendy Watriss.
opportunity to express a grief that was not previously sanctioned; to others, it is
either a profound antiwar statement or an opportunity to rewrite the history of
the war to make it fit more neatly into the master narrative of American
imperialism.
The memorial’s popularity must thus be seen in the context of a very active
scripting and rescripting of the war and as an integral component of the recently
emerged Vietnam War nostalgia industry. This nostalgia is not confined to those
who wish to return to the intensity of wartime; it is also the media’s nostalgia for
its own moment of moral power-the Vietnam War was, shall we not forget, very
good television. For Michael Clark, the media nostalgia campaign “healed over
the wounds that had refused to close for ten years with a balm of nostalgia, and
transformed guilt and doubt into duty and pride. And with a triumphant flourish
it offered us the spectacle of its most successful creation, the veterans who will
fight the next war.”38 The rush to reexamine the Vietnam War is, inevitably, a
desire to rescript current political events and to reinscribe a narrative of American
imperialism, most obviously in Central America and the Persian Gulf.
As the healing process of the Vietnam War is transformed into spectacle and
commodity, a complex nostalgia industry has grown. Numerous magazines that
reexamine and recount Vietnam War experiences have emerged; the merchandizing
of Frederick Hart’s statue (which includes posters, T-shirts, a Franklin
Mint miniature, and a plastic model kit) generates about $50,000 a year, half of
which goes to the VVMF and half to Hart; and travel agencies are marketing
tours to Indochina for veteran^.^’ In the hawkish Vietnam magazine, between articles
that reexamine incidents in the war, advertisements display a variety of
Vietnam War products: the Vietnam War Commemorative Combat Shotgun, the
Vietnam Veterans Trivia Game, Vietnam War medallions, posters, T-shirts, and
calendars. Needless to say, the Vietnam War is also now big business in both television
drama and Hollywood movies.
While Maya Lin’s memorial has yet to be made into a marketable reproduction,
it has functioned as a catalyst for much of this nostalgia. The Vietnam Veterans
Memorial is the subject of no fewer than six books, three of which are
photography books.40 The memorial has tapped into a reservoir of need to
express in public the pain of this war, a desire to transfer private memories into
a collective experience. The personal artifacts that have been left at the memorial-
photographs, letters, teddy bears, MIAIPOW bracelets, clothes, medals of
honor-are offered up as testimony, transposed from personal to cultural artifacts,
to bear witness to pain suffered (fig. 1).Relinquished before the wall, they
tell many stories:
We did what we could but it was not enough because I found you here. You are not just a
name on this wall. You are alive. You are blood on my hands. You are screams in my ears.
You are eyes in my soul. I told you you’d be all right, but I lied, and please forgive me. I
see your face in my son, I can’t bear the thought. You told me about your wife, your kids,
your girl, your mother. And then you died. Your pain is mine. I’ll never forget your face.
I can’t. You are still alive.
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.”‘
Many of these letters are addressed not to visitors but to the dead (very similar to
the texts of the AIDS quilt). They are messages for the dead that are intended to
be shared as cultural memory.
The National Park Service, which is now in charge of maintaining the memorial,
is compiling an archive of the materials left at the memorial and is storing
them at the Museum and Archaeological Regional Storage facility (MARS). Originally,
the Park Service classified these objects as “lost and found.” Later, Park
Service officials realized the artifacts had been left intentionally, and they began
to save them. The objects thus moved from the cultural status of being “lost”
(without category) to historical artifacts. They have now even been transposed into
artistic artifacts; the curator of the collection at MARS writes:
These are no longer objects at the Wall, they are communications, icons possessing a substructure
of underpinning emotion. They are the products of culture, in all its complexi-
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 135
ties. They are the products of individual selection. With each object we are in the presence
of a work of art of individual contemplation. The thing itself does not overwhelm our
attention since these are objects that are common and expendable. At the Wall they have
become unique and irreplaceable, and yes, my~terious.~’
Labeled “mysterious” and coded as original works of art, these objects are given
value and authorship. Many were left anonymously, or simply signed with first
names, and some of those who left them have since been traced by the media and
book authors. This attempt to tie these objects and letters to their creators reveals
again the shifting realms of personal and cultural memory. Assigned authorship
and placed in an historical archive, the objects are pulled from cultural memorya
discursive field in which they are presented to be shared and to participate in
the memories of others-and made into aesthetic and historical objects. More
than 5,000 of them have been left at the memorial and catalogued, tagged, and
stored at MARS.
The ritual of leaving something behind can be seen as an active participation
in the accrual of many histories; the archiving of these artifacts also subsumes
them within history. Does this archive represent the shifting territory between
history and cultural memory? Michel Foucault has defined the archive as the “law
of what can be said” and a “system of en~nciability.”C~e~rt ainly, the traditional
archive is a limited system of enunciation with a narrative function, one that prescribes
the limits of history and defines what will and will not be preserved. The
archive of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, while regulated by the government,
is constituted differently than many archives. There are no regulations for what
is included in the archive; it contains all artifacts left at the memorial that have
been personalized in some way. This collection will have a primary effect on
future interpretations of the Vietnam War and of how the country dealt with its
memory. Couched within an official history-that is, in a government institution-
the narratives inscribed in these letters to the dead will continue to reassert
strands of cultural memory that disrupt historical narratives.
The Construction of a History
The walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial act as a screen for many
projections about the history of the Vietnam War and its aftermath. Beyond its
foregrounding of individual names and the implicit condemnation of war in that
listing, the memorial does not take a stand on the specific controversies about and
contested versions of the Vietnam War. It has nevertheless catalyzed the writing
of a particular narrative of the war, precisely because its emphasis on the veterans
and war dead has allowed the discourse of heroism, sacrifice, and honor to resurface.
As Thomas Myers has written, “A block of stone may be a powerful text
with many subtexts, or it may be an inert simplification of historical reality that
assuages memory-it depends on the readership” (192).
Much of the current embrace of the memorial smacks of historical revisionism.
The memorial’s placement on the Washington Mall inscribes it within a
nationalist discourse, restricting in many ways the discourse of memory it can
provide. In the interim between the end of the war and the positioning of the
memorial as a national wailing wall, there has also been plenty of opportunity for
memories and culpability to fade. It is rarely noted that in none of the discussion
surrounding the memorial are the Vietnamese people ever mentioned. This is
not a memorial to their loss; it does not even recognize that loss. They cannot
even be named in the context of the Mall. Key players in this historical drama
such as Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger also remain
noticeably absent in the memorial discourse. In the context of this outpouring of
grief, the intricate reasons why the lives represented by the inscribed names were
lost in vain remain absent.
Thus, remembering is in itself a form of forgetting. Does the remembrance
of the battles fought by the veterans in Vietnam and at home necessarily eclipse
and screen out any acknowledgment of the war’s effect on the Vietnamese, in
whose country the war was fought? Does the process of public commemoration
of a war necessitate choosing sides?44
The act of commemoration is a legitimation process, one that Ehrenhaus
notes “entails reaffirming the legitimacy of purpose for which a community has
issued its call for sacrifice” (97). If that purpose has been highly contested, the act
of commemoration would seen. to necessitate the choice of one narrative over
another. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has spawned two very different kinds
of remembrance: one a retrenched historical narrative that attempts to rewrite
the Vietnam War in a way that reinscribes American imperialism and the masculinity
of the American soldier, the other a textured and complex discourse of
remembrance that has allowed the Americans af’fected by this war-the veterans,
their families, and the families and friends of the war dead-to speak of loss,
pain, and futility. The screens of the memorial thus act as screen memories in two
senses: they attempt to conceal and to offer themselves as the primary narrative,
while they provide a screen for projections of a multitude of memories and individual
interpretations?’
The incommunicability of Vietnam War experience has been mollified by the
communicability of the experience of its memorial. Yet, we cannot understand
the role played by this memorial, by its dzfference as a memorial, unless we understand
what made the war it memorializes different. In the Vietnam War, the standard
definitions of warfare had no meaning. This was a war in which the enemy
was not always known, and in which master narratives of “free” world versus
communism and first-world technology versus third-world “peasantry” were no
longer credible. The rupture in history made by the Vietnam War is not only of
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 137
the experience of warfare and the ability of this country to impose its will on
others; it is a rupture in how we perceive war. It now appears that there are
desperate attempts to conceal and suture that rupture, and to reinscribe in wars
such as the recent Persian Gulf War these narratives of American technological
superiority, masculinity, and imperial power. Couched within nationalist discourse
yet the catalyst for a rich and diverse discourse on the tragic and futile
aspects of war, the memorial stands in a precarious space between these opposing
discourses.
Notes
I would like to thank Vicente Diaz, Hayden White, Donna Haraway, Vivian Sobchack,
Mary John, Marcy Darnovsky, and the editors of Representations for their helpful criticisms
of previous drafts of this essay.
1. Peter ~h r e n h a u s “, Commemorating the Unwon War: On Not Remembering Vietnam,”
Journal of Communication 39, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 96. Subsequent citations will
be given in parentheses in the text.
2. Attempts tdgive the Persian Gulf War a simple and neat narrative reinscribing master
narratives of World War 11-in which, for example, the United States liberates a desperate
and weak country imperiled by a dangerous tyrant-make it clear that the
disruptive and fragmentary narrative of the Vietnam War is not due simply to its
situation in the late twentieth century. Current government and military administrations
learned many things from the Vietnam War: the importance of the kind of finely
tuned war narrative the Vietnam War lacked, as well as the need for military censorship
and for quickly putting American lives at stake to foreclose debate on the war.
3. Each row contains five names, with space at the end of each line where additional
names have been added. There is a system of distinguishing the names of the unverified
dead from the classifiably dead. Each name is preceded by a diamond shape; in
the case of the 1,300 POWIMIAs, the name is preckded by a small cross that is then
changed to a diamond in the event that the remains of that person are identified. If
that MIA should return alive, this symbol would be changed to a circle (but, as one
volunteer told me at the memorial, “‘we don’t have any cirdes yet”).
4. Arthur C. Danto, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” TheNation, 31 August 1985, 152.
5. Charles L. Griswold, “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall:
Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Summer 1986):
689.
6. I do not mean to imply that these are hard-and-fast rules. There are many World War
I and World War I1 memorials in Europe, for instance, that list the dead. (For
example, memorial designer Maya Lin was influenced in her design by a memorial in
Thiepval, France, for the dead of the Somme offensive in World War I, which consists
of a great arch inscribed with 73,000 names.) These are, however, memorials and not
monuments, albeit memorials of a victorious cause. Their emphasis is thus not on
celebrating victory as much as mourning the price in lives of that victory.
7. Tom Wolfe, “Art Disputes War: The Battle of the Vietnam Memorial,” Washington Post,
13 October 1982, B4.
8. Carl Andre’s work, which consists of thirty-six large boulders positioned on a lawn
near Hartford’s city hall, is widely regarded with derision by residents as a symbol o f
the misguided judgments of their city government. Richard Serra’s now notorious
Tilted Arc, an oppressive, leaning slab of Cor-Ten steel that bisected the equally inhospitable
Federal Plaza in New York, was dismantled in March 1989,after several years
of controversy, when workers in the Federal Building petitioned to have it removed.
See Kenneth Baker, “Andre in Retrospect,” Art in America, April 1980; Patricia C. Phillips,
“Forum: Something There Is That Doesn’t Love a Wall,”Artforum, Summer 1985;
Robert Storr, “‘Tilted Arc’: Enemy of the People?” Art in America, September 1985.
9. See Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays
on Postmodern Culture, ed, by Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash., 1983). The sitespecificity
of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is crucial to its position as both subversive
of and continuous within the nationalist discourse of the Mall. Maya Lin calls
herself “super site-specific” and did not decide on the final design until she visited the
site. However, a traveling version of the wall has toured the country with powerful
effect. This effect would seem to be the result of the traveling wall’s reference of the
site-specific wall, in addition to the power evoked by the inscribed names in whatever
location.
10. These attacks came mostly from a certain faction of veterans and members of the
“New Right,” including veteran Tom Carhart, who had been involved in the VVMF;
Phyllis Schafly; and millionaire Ross Perot, who had contributed the money for the
design contest.
11. Tom Carhart, quoted in Elizabeth Hess, “Vietnam: Memorials of Misfortune,” in
Unwinding the Vietnam War: From War into Peace, ed. Reese Williams (Seattle, 1987), 265.
This argument against the color black was quickly ended by Gen. George Price, who
is black, who said at a meeting concerning the memorial, “Black is not the color of
shame. I am tired of hearing itcalled such by you. Color meant nothing on the battlefields
of Korea and Vietnam. We are all equal in combat. Color should mean nothing
now”; quoted in Jan C. Scruggs and Joel Swerdlow, To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans
Memorial (New York, 1985).Subsequent citations for both these texts will be given
in parentheses in the text.
12. “Stop that Monument,” National Review, 18 September 1981, 1064. What the editors
of National Review did not take into account in their interpretation of the memorial’s
V as the peace sign is the malleability of this particular symbol, one that was easily
appropriated by Richard Nixon, for instance,-with both hands waving in the air, to
symbolize his personal political victory. The memorial actually seems to take on many
shapes in the innumerable photographs of it. It could conceivably be seen as evoking
the shape of an airplane’s wings, although I have never heard this comparison made.
Lin has stated that she never saw it as a V but as a circle.
13. Michael Sorkin, “What Happens When a Woman Designs a War Monument?” Vogue,
May 1983, 122.
14. Maya Lin, quoted in “America Remembers: Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” National
Geographic 167, no. 5 (May 1985): 557.
15. From “An Interview with Maya Lin,” in Williams, Unwinding the Vietnam War, 271.
16. Frederick Hart was reportedly paid more than ten times the $20,000 fee that Maya
Lin received for her design from the same fund. See Peter Tauber, “Monument
Maker,” New York Times Magazine, 24 February 199 1, 53.
17. From “An Interview with Frederick Hart,” in Williams, Unwinding the Vietnam War, 274.
18. It is interesting to note that this status is heavily dependent on modern codes of
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 139
realism. The Marine Corps War Memorial is based on a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning
photograph taken by photojournalist Joe Rosenthal, and thus coded as a moment
captured from reality. Of the six men in the photograph, three survived the war and
posed for sculptor Felix W. de Weldon. However, the famous Rosenthal photograph
was, in fact, a restaging of the actual event of the flag raising. See Marvin Heiferman,
“One Nation, Chiseled in Pictures: The Monumental Nature of American Photography,”
in “Lee Friedlander: American Monuments,” The Archive (Center for Creative
Photography, Tucson, no. 25, n.d.); and the National Parks Service brochure of the
United States Marine Corps War Memorial.
Lin told National Geographic, “Later, when I visited, I searched out the name of a
friend’s father. I touched it and I cried. I was another visitor, and I was reacting as I
had designed it”; “America Remembers,” 557.
Since the construction of both of these memorials, there have been approximately 150
memorials to the Vietnam veterans built or proposed around the country. Elizabeth
Hess notes that “for the most part, it is Frederick Hart, rather than Maya Lin, who has
managed to set (conservative) aesthetic and ideological precedents for the cloning of
the Vietnam memorial. A strong desire to diminish, rather than engage the radical
elements in Lin’s design is evident in the majority of these new memorials”; “Vietnam,”
275. However, Lin has continued in her career to have influence on the aesthetics of
memorials. She recently designed a civil rights memorial for the Southern Poverty
Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, which adds water to the motif of names
inscribed on a wall; people touch the names of those martyred in the civil rights movement
as water runs over the inscriptions.
William Broyles, Jr., “Remembering a War We Want to Forget,” Newsweek, 22
November 1982,82.
See Associated Press, “38 Living Veterans May Be on Memorial,” SunJose Mercury News,
15 February 1991, 6F. The reason for this error appears to be the result of faulty
record keeping by the Defense Department and a 1973 fire that destroyed many records.
Robert Doubek, a cofounder of the VVMF, decided to include thirty-eight
names of casualties for which there were incomplete records because he felt it was
better to err by inclusion rather than omission.
It has been barely noted in the media, for instance, that the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier for the Vietnam War, which was approved by Congress in 1974, was left empty
and uninscribed until 1984, when some publicity drew attention to the situation. The
ostensible reason for this delay was, according to the army, that there were no unidentifiable
remains. (In fact, the army had several unidentified remains that they were
refusing, under some pressure from MIA families, to finally classify as such.) Technology’s
ability to decipher the individual status of the body, and hence achieve a kind
of closure, is thus at stake here. See Ehrenhaus, “Commemorating the Unwon War,”
105.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 84.
George Swiers, “‘Demented Vets’ and Other Myths-The Moral Obligation of Veterans,”
in Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons From a War, ed. Harrison Salisbury (New York,
1984), 198.
Thomas Myers, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam (New York, 1988), 190.
Subsequent citations will be given in parentheses in the text.
Peter Marin, “Conclusion,” in Salisbury, Vietnam Reconsidered, 213.
See Keith Walker, A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of Twenty-Six Women Who Served in
Vietnam (Novato, Calif., 1985), 2.
29. Susan Wolf, “Women and Vietnam: Remembering in the 1980s,” in Williams,
Unwinding the Vietnam War, 245.
30. See Barbara Gamarekian, “Competition Opens on War Memorial,” New York Times, 20
August 1990, A16.
31. Hess, “Vietnam,” 276. Hence, the singular narrative of Hart’s realist depiction is one
of inclusion and exclusion. This would also account for why so much has been written
about the ethnicitv of the three men in the statue-one is obviouslv black, but the two
others are ambiguous, leading some observers to call them Jewish or Hispanic. Not
surprisingly, Lin is not happy with the potential addition of the women’s statue. The
congressional bill for the women’s statue stipulates that it will be the last addition to
the memorial, but according to The Nation, there are already other groups such as Air
Force pilots, Navy seamen, and Native Americans who are demanding their own
statues, as well as occasional attempts (including one at the time of the initial debate)
to erect a flag in the center of the walls’ V. See David Corn and Jefferson Morley,
“Beltway Bandits,” The Nation, 4 June 1988, 780. Corn and Morley, like many other
commentators, have mistakenly assumed that these constituents feel left out of the
wall. It would appear, however, that it is Hart’s statue that makes them feel excluded.
32. See Susan Jeffords’ extensive study, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the
Vietnam War (Bloomington, Ind., 1989).
33. The Vietnamese have been portrayed metaphorically in feminine terms in many
Vietnam War narratives. In two recent Hollywood films, Full Metal Jacket (1987) and
Casualties of War (1989), for instance, a Vietnamese woman comes to symbolize
Vietnam in general. The absence of Vietnamese male protagonists in American
Vietnam War films is notable.
34. The film Born on the Fourth ofJuly (1989), based on veteran Ron Kovic’s autobiography,
foregrounds the veteran body. Between the requisite scenes of Kovic as a patriotic,
young American and his awakening as an antiwar activist, the film concentrates on the
painful details of his life as a paraplegic-the wounded veteran body, impotent, with
uncontrollable bodily fluids, attempting to heal in a squalid VA hospital.
35. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmakingof the World (New York, 1985),
116.
36. The high proportion of American soldiers killed by “friendly fire” in the Persian Gulf
War also undermines the traditional notion of the conventional army moving forward
as a singular body. If you can be killed so easily by friendly fire, then does i<matter if
you know who the enemy is or not?
37. Most of these memorials have conventional realist designs, but several stand out in
their innovative approaches to commemoration. One project in Wisconsin includes a
hundred-acre memorial park and museum for artifacts and memorabilia, and other
projects include memorial trees and time capsules. See Elizabeth Hess, “Vietnam”;
and Ben A. Franklin, “143 Vietnam Memorials, Vast and Small, Rising Around
Nation,” New York Times, 9 November 1986, 26. The New York Veterans Memorial in
downtown Manhattan, like the memorial in Washington, also privileges text. It consists
of a wall of glass brick onto which are inscribed quotes from letters written by veterans
as well as quotes from newspapers and politicians.
38. Michael Clark, “Remembering Vietnam,” Cultural Critique 3 (Spring 1986): 49.
39. Joshua Hammer, “Cashing in on Vietnam,” Newsweek, 16 January 1989, 39. Evidence
of the potential marketing power of the wall can be found in the rather perverse
recent campaigns of two companies, Coors Brewing Company and Service Corporation
International, a funeral and cemetery conglomerate. Both have built their own
The Wall, the Screen, and the Image 141
“moving” walls for marketing purposes, against the wishes of the veterans in charge
of the traveling memorial. See Michelle Guido, “A Wall Divided by Commercialism,”
San Jose Mercury News, 14 March 199 1, 1A.
40. In addition to Scruggs’s book, these are: Saul Lopes, ed., The Wall: Images and Offerings
from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York, 1987); Lydia Fish, The Last Firebase: A
Guide to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Shippensburg, Pa., 1987); Michael Katakis, The
Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York, 1988); Duncan Spencer, Facing the Wall: Americans
at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York, 1986); and Laura Palmer, Shrapnel in the
Heart: Letters and Remembrances from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (New York, 1988).
41. See Lopes, The Wall, 56, 12 1.
42. David Guynes, quoted in Fish, Last Firebase, 54.
43. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology ofKnowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan (New York, 1972),
129.
44. That the Vietnamese are excluded from this discourse about the war, and represented
only as anonymous figures in contemporary Vietnam War films, points of course to
the central question of why this war was fought. If the remembrance of the war in the
United States excludes the Vietnamese, then perhaps it points to the real reason for
the war, not to “save” a foreign country but to retain the image of a world power for
the United States. Hannah Arendt has written, “This enterprise was exclusively
guided by the needs of a superpower to create for itself an image which would convince
the world that it was indeed ‘the mightiest power on earth'”; see “Home to Roost: A
Bicentennial Address,” New York Review of Books 22, no. 11 (26 June 1976): 4. The
parallels to the recent Persian Gulf War are painfully obvious. The reiteration in
popular-culture Vietnam War representations that the war was not about Vietnam but
about us (for instance, the protagonist in Platoon says that “we did not fight the enemy,
we fought ourselves-and the enemy was in us”) also effaces the Vietnamese and the
devastation of their country.
45. The limitations of this memory in the nationalist context became particularly clear in
the recent appropriations of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the antiwar movement
of the Persian Gulf War. As testament to the iconic status of the memorial as a
statement about the human costs of war, there were several “Desert Storm Memorial
Walls” in evidence at antiwar rallies. Here, the inscription of ten to twenty American
names seemed ludicrous in light of reports that hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were
being killed. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, where the student antiwar
movement constructed a memorial wall at the base of campus, someone responded by
scrawling “85,000 to 100,000 Iraqis but Who’s Counting, Proud Yet?” in spraypaint
after the short list of American names. It would seem then that this project backfired.
Appropriations of the memorial for the Persian Gulf War thus demonstrated both the
iconic power of the memorial as well as its limitations.
