Arts of War on the Web

Last week the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund announced a national call for photographs of the more than 58,000 men and women whose names are on The Wall in Washington. The photos will be featured in a high-tech display in the proposed $85 million underground Education Center that is planned nearby.

In an event held at the Newseum in Washington, former Nebraska Sen. (and Vietnam veteran) Chuck Hagel and Peter Holt, the owner of the San Antonio Spurs (and a Vietnam veteran and the chair of the Campaign to Build the Education Center), joined VVMF head Jan Scruggs to kick off the endeavor, which has had a jump start with the thousands of photos that the the Fund has collected that appear on its “Virtual Wall” web site on the Internet.

“We’ve got 10,000 already,” Scruggs told The Washington Post. “By the time we get this built, we’ll have 80 to 85 percent of them. And then, within 10 days, we’ll have the rest.”

For info on how to submit a photo, go to the VVMF web page.

A recent New York Times article reported on the controversy over adding a new monument to the Wichita, Kansas’ Veterans Memorial Park. Members of the city’s Vietnamese exile community proposed adding a bronze statue of an American solider with his arm around the shoulder of a South Vietnamese comrade soldier in the 3.5-acre park, which is owned city. The Vietnamese monument would symbolize the American-ARVN fight against the Vietnamese communists.

But the plan drew heavy criticism from some American veterans, and the monument will now be built away from the park’s other monuments. In fact, it will sit outside the park, and will be walled off by a six-foot earthen berm.

“The entire park was created solely for America’s veterans who fought America’s wars for America’s armed forces,” said Philip W. Blake, a World War II veteran who volunteers at the park. “The memorial they wanted was going to be dead center in the park.”

Another veteran, John Wilson, who created a group to oppose placing the memorial inside the park, told The Times that the reaction against the memorial is not anti-Vietnamese. “This doesn’t have anything to do with being Vietnamese,” he said. “This is about serving in the American military. That’s it.”

The Wichita City Council, The Times said, “approved the new plan — berm and all — on a 7-to-0 vote. The Council made it clear that Veterans Memorial Park was meant to honor American service members exclusively and gave veterans’ groups a role in deciding what types of memorials to include in the future.”

To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the July 8, 1959, deaths of U.S. Army Master Sgt. Chester Ovnand and Maj. Dale Buis in Bien Hoa, Vietnam (widely recognized as the first Americans to perish in the Vietnam War), the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund will stage a special ceremony and wreath laying on July 8 at 10:30 a.m. at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Among the speakers will be journalist, author and Vietnam War expert Stanley Karnow (Vietnam: A History), who reported from Saigon on the deaths of Ovnand and Buis in 1959 and Capt. Nathaniel P. Ward IV, whose father, Col. Nathaniel P. Ward III, was chief of staff of the Military Assistance Advisory
Group in Vietnam in 1959. Jan Scruggs, VVMF founder and president, also will speak.

As the photo above shows, Ovnand’s name was misspelled when it was inscribed at the apex of The Wall on Panel 1E, Row 1 in 1982. So the name was added again, with the correct spelling, at Panel 7E, Row 46.

The theme of the big, splashy feature article in the March 17 Washington Post Style section on the new exhibit, “May Lin: Systematic Landscapes,” running through July 12 at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery of Art, was the fact that the renowned artist was having her first show in the nation’s capital since 1981. That’s when her Vietnam Veterans Memorial design was unveiled.

Lin went on to design several other memorials and “monumental landscapes,” and the show is “her attempt to bring indoors” the work “that she has been doing for the past 15 years,” reporter David Montgomery wrote in the article.

Montgomery asked Lin about her famed reticence to speak publicly about The Wall. “She was busy processing the precocious success and controversy,” he said, referring to how young Lin was (a college junior) when she won the nationwide design contest, and the loud criticism of her abstract design from some quarters, “trying to figure out who she was as an artist. And she was working hard at her art–’obsessively,’ she says. Her instinct was, don’t look back, keep creating.”

Lin said she continues to have conflicting feelings about the experience. “It’s not bad memories,” she told Montgomery. “Let’s put it this way: I didn’t have a really nice time.”

“I do think I have this big white elephant right here,” she said, pointing to the area of the Memorial. “Like, ‘Oh, God, she did that, it’s so great. You know, this [other] stuff is crap.’ It’s going to happen.”

Lin said she was “desperately trying to move past the Memorial as fast as possible as an artist. I was trying to prove to myself that I could balance out my life in a different way. After the Vietnam Memorial, I don’t think you can prove it to the world to a degree that you would need to, so I’m just not interested.”

It’s “not that I don’t love the Memorial,” she said. “But you do feel it’s like this big galumphing elephant. And I think you move on. And yet, at the same time, it’s a big piece. It will always by my biggest piece and I’m very proud of it.”

She visited the Memorial while in D.C. with her husband and two daughters, something, Lin said, she likes to do at night. “It was really magical,” she said. “In a funny way, the popularity of it is a sign it’s working. But when you’re dealing with intimacy and connection, there’s something when you see it with a lot of people that’s different from when you see it on your own.”

When you picture war and veterans memorials in the nation’s capital, you immediately think of the amazing Vietnam Veterans Memorial (The Wall), which has sat at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial since 1982. The other memorials that come readily to mind are the huge World War II Memorial at the other end of the National Mall across from the Washington Monument, and the Korean War Veterans Memorial across the Reflecting Pond from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Few visitors to Washington know about or visit the war memorial dedicated in 1931 to honor veterans of World War I. Officially known as the District of Columbia War Memorial, the modest structure is located just off the Mall in a grove of trees not far from the World War II Memorial close to the Reflecting Pool.

The memorial is a classical circular dome supported by a dozen Doric columns, and is reminiscent of the nearby Jefferson Memorial. The names of the 499 residents of the District of Columbia who died in World War I are inscribed around its base.

That memorial is, sad to say, in extreme disrepair today. It is all but hidden away among overgrown trees and bushes, and is seldom marked on Park Service or other tourist maps or signs. A plan is afoot to restore the memorial, re-landscape it and rededicate it as a national memorial to honor the memory of all of the nation’s World War I veterans.

The effort is being spearheaded by the the WWI Memorial Foundation. To learn more about the foundation and its mission, go to www.WWIMEMORIAL.org There’s also a video on You Tube worth checking out.

The number has now reached 58,260. The number, that is, of names etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Four additional names were added to The Wall during the second week of May. Those of:

• Marine Lance Cpl. Raymond Mason of Bristol, Rhode Island., who was seriously wounded during Tet ’68, and who died as a result of those wounds in 2006.
• Marine Lance Cpl. Richard M. Goossens of Racine, Wisconsin, who received multiple gunshot wounds on May 12, 1968, and who died in 2004.
• Army Spec4 Dennis O. Hargrove of Burns, Tennessee, who was severely wounded on May 10, 1969, and who died in 1987.
• Army Spec4 Darrell J. Naylor of Balko Beaver, Oklahoma, who was wounded on April 14, 1967, and who died in 2006.

The names, which were added to The Wall as closely as possible to their dates of casualty, will become “official” when they are read aloud during the annual Memorial Day Ceremony at The Wall on Monday, May 26.

For more info, see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s detailed press release at

http://vvmf.org/index.cfm?SectionID=676