Vietnam Veterans Memorial: The Black Granite Scar
Why is it significant?
Descend the gently sloping stone pathway into the quiet hollow of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As the ground drops beneath your shoes, the black polished granite walls rise higher and higher beside you, until they tower ten feet overhead at the apex.
Key Facts
| Place | Vietnam Veterans Memorial: The Black Granite Scar |
|---|---|
| Address | 5 Henry Bacon Dr NW, Washington, DC 20245 |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.89130, -77.04770 |
| Part of Walk | The National Mall: Monuments to Freedom, Civil Rights, and Cold War Echoes |
| Generated | Generated |
Descend the gently sloping stone pathway into the quiet hollow of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As the ground drops beneath your shoes, the black polished granite walls rise higher and higher beside you, until they tower ten feet overhead at the apex. Gaze into the stone: the mirror-like granite reflects your own living face overlapping with the names of fifty-eight thousand two hundred and eighty-one American servicemen and women who gave their lives in Southeast Asia.
When Yale undergraduate architectural student Maya Lin submitted this design in nineteen eighty-one for a nationwide anonymous competition, she was just twenty-one years old. Her design beat out over one thousand four hundred entries. Lin conceived the wall not as a triumphal war monument, but as a quiet, open wound cut into the earth that time would gently heal with green grass.
The names are arranged chronologically by date of casualty, beginning and ending at the center apex, forming an unbroken circle of sacrifice. Visitors constantly touch names with trembling fingers or take pencil rubbings on paper.
Walk south across the Mall toward the Korean War Veterans Memorial.