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SOLERA DIAMOND VALLEY | JULY 2021 3 THE VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL WALL The average age of the soldiers killed in Vietnam was 19; most of those who died had been drafted. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was born out of clear vision of what was to be represented: the dead, the veterans, and the sense of community that had made the war palatable to some Americans between 1957 and 1975. The problem, however, of what the death, the veterans, and the lost community suggested together and how they might be represented was the subject of many public and private battles. The work of any memorial is to construct the meaning of an event from fragments of experience and memory. A memorial gives shape to and consolidates public memory: it makes history. As historian James Mayo argues, "How the past is commemorated through a country's war memorials mirrors what people want to remember, and lack of attention reflects what they wish to forget." The veterans fighting to shape the meaning of the Vietnam War found that their efforts to commemorate this country's longest war were met with all of the conflicting emotions and ideologies expressed about the war itself. There was no consensus about what the names represented, about what to remember or what to forget. The deeply controversial nature of the war, its unpopularity, and the reality that it was lost created an enormous void of meaning that compounded the difficult work of memorializing. What it meant to die in this war was as unclear as what it meant to fight in it. Moreover, the duration of the war, the military's system of rotation, and the defeat precluded the ticker-tape parades young boys going to war might have anticipated. Veterans came home to changing ideas about patriotism and heroism; they returned to a society riven with civil rights movement, Watergate, and the assassinations of the men who had inspired many of them to fight. There was no clear ideology around which a community of grief could have formed. It was muddled, lost war waiting to be forgotten even before it was over. People who lost their children, husbands, fathers, sisters, and their own hearts were without a public community for the expression of grief or rage or pride. This lack of community not only made them deeply crave a remembrance of the experience of Americans in Vietnam, but also made the work of remembering especially difficult. Commemorating the war and the deaths required giving new shape to the broken meanings of the war. It required a reimagination of the nation. This article is excerpted from Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam War by Kristin Ann Hass @1998. Published by the University of California Press. Message from the Board By Ralph Grider, SDV Board Treasurer

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