The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, commonly called the Vietnam Memorial, is a U.S. national memorial in Washington, D.C., honoring service members of the U.S. armed forces who served in the Vietnam War. The two-acre (8,100 m²) site is dominated by two black granite walls engraved with the names of those service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia during the war. The Memorial Wall was designed by American architect Maya Lin and is an example of minimalist architecture. The Wall, completed in 1982, has since been supplemented with the statue Three Soldiers in 1984 and the Vietnam Women’s Memorial in 1993.
The memorial is composed of two adjoining walls. Each wall is 246 feet 9 inches (75.21 m) long and is composed of 72 black granite panels that are polished to a high finish. Seventy of the panels on each wall are inscribed with the names of the men and women being honored. The walls taper from 8 inches (200 mm) tall at their extremities to 10.1 feet (3.1 m) tall at the apex where they meet, their bottom edges descending below the level of the surrounding earth while their top edges stay level. As such, visitors walking the length of the memorial start at ground level, descend below it, and ascend back to ground level. This is symbolic of a “wound that is closed and healing” and exemplifies the Land art movement of the 1960s, which produced sculptures that sought to reconnect with the natural environment. The stone for the 144 panels was quarried in Bangalore, India.
The names on the Wall, originally numbering 57,939 when it was dedicated in 1982, are listed in the chronological order of the dates of casualty. Additional names have been added throughout the years since: as of May 2018 there were 58,320 names. The number of names on the wall differs from other counts of U.S. Vietnam War deaths. Directories of the names and their locations are located on nearby podiums at both ends of the Memorial.
The memorial has had some unforeseen maintenance issues. In 1984, cracks were detected in the granite and, as a result, two of the panels were temporarily removed in 1986 for study. More cracks were later discovered in 2010. There are a number of hypotheses about the cause of the cracks, the most common being due to thermal cycling. In 1990, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund purchased several blank panels to use in case any were ever damaged; these were placed into storage at Quantico Marine Base. Two of the blank panels were shattered by the 2011 Virginia earthquake.
