Washington Monument Height - Vietnam Memorial invites reflection, reconciliation

Vietnam Memorial invites reflection, reconciliation

Joseph R. Reisert
11/16/2007
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The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., was dedicated 25 years ago this week.

The occasion was commemorated last Sunday, Veterans Day, with a ceremony featuring an address by former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell, a retired general, is a veteran of the Vietnam War.

I was on the Mall early on Saturday, long before the official event, but even then scores of returning Vietnam veterans were making their pilgrimage to the memorial that has meant so much to so many of them.

When it was built, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unlike everything else on the National Mall.

The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials and the Washington Monument are all soaring, white marble edifices.

The two marble memorials stand as shrines to the ideals of America's most idealistic presidents. Both feature larger than life statues of the presidents they honor, as if Lincoln and Jefferson were greater than ordinary mortals. Both memorials feature the words through which they called America to its highest expressions of liberty and equality.

The Washington Monument is simple and abstract, an unmarked obelisk pointing to the sky -- suggesting the greatness of Washington's achievement and the uprightness of his character.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is, in every respect, the opposite of the others. They are erected from white marble; it is constructed from black granite. They reach skyward; it is a wall, set into a hillside, below ground. The wall consists of two long, narrow triangles set base to base, reaching a height of about 10 feet in the center, tapering to a point at either end. Etched into the wall are the names of those killed or officially recorded as missing in action, listed in chronological order.

Where the older memorials articulate or imply the nobility of America's moral aspirations, the Vietnam Memorial spoke to me of nothing but failure and futility, and, of course, of death.

So I thought, when it opened.

Too young to have any first-hand recollection of the war or the turmoil it provoked at home, I nevertheless knew what I liked in a war memorial: I liked the noble and the grand. I much preferred the equestrian statue of Ulysses S. Grant, facing west from the front of the Capitol toward the Washington Monument, looking every inch the conquering Civil War general whose grim determination to take and inflict heavy casualties won the war and saved the Union.

Twenty-five years later, I have come to appreciate what the Vietnam Memorial's architect, Maya Lin, must have understood intuitively: the Vietnam War was nothing like the Civil War, and the America of the decades after that war was nothing like the self-confident, rising power that emerged from Grant's victory.

Although the memorial opened to controversy, Vietnam veterans and the friends and kin of those whose names appear on the wall have embraced it. Long before I came to understand the memorial or to value it for itself, I found myself deeply moved by the emotional responses of other visitors as they walked, or stood, or knelt before the somber wall of black granite. The memorial spoke to those veterans and others touched by the Vietnam War, and it reached them -- intimately, viscerally -- in a way it did not reach me.

The philosopher Charles Griswold recently published a remarkable book about forgiveness, and near its end, he offers a profound interpretation of the Vietnam Memorial, which, finally, enabled me to understand: it is, or rather invites, a process of national apology and forgiveness.

The memorial does not, as I had thought, speak of failure or futility. It does not speak, affirmatively, at all; it questions.

The memorial's black granite is polished to a reflective finish for a reason. Standing before the wall to read the names inscribed there, the visitor sees his own reflection, with the names of the lost and fallen across his own image. The walls, one of which points to the Lincoln Memorial, the other to the Washington Monument, invite us to ask ourselves: Did we live up to our national ideals in sending these of our fellow citizens to war in Vietnam? Did we live up to those ideals in how we treated them and their fellow veterans when they returned home to us?

The Vietnam Memorial's power to invite reflection and reconciliation, and even healing, is extraordinary. But I also pray that we will not need to construct our next war memorial in its likeness.

Joseph R. Reisert is associate professor of American Constitutional Law and chairman of the Department of Government at Colby College in Waterville.