Up Against the Wall at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

By Temple Ligon

One of America’s most sophisticated periodicals, The New York Review of Books, arrived on my front porch last week. Always a good read and sometimes a struggle, the NYR has been one of my favorites since I came home from Vietnam in 1971. Anti-military for most of that time, the NYR could always be counted on to hold the Department of Defense accountable.

The NYR began as a temporary replacement for the New York Times in 1964 during a newspaper strike. The Sunday Times book reviews were sorely missed by the literati, so two got together and cranked out the NYR. After the strike, they kept it up due to popular demand.

From the beginning, the NYR was known for serious criticism not only in literature but in art and architecture, too. Currently the resident architecture critic is Martin Filler, a product of Columbia University who is best known as the author of two surveys of the history of Modern architecture.

In last week’s NYR issue Filler covered the work of architect Maya Lin, particularly her Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington. Lin’s design includes two 246’-9’ gabbro walls now etched with 58,307 names of the war dead. Originally there were 58,192 names from 1957 to 1975. In 1981, Lin submitted her design of the veterans memorial along with 1,420 others in competition, none identified by name, just numbers to keep anonymity in play.

The selection committee chose its 232 favorites, then narrowed that down to 39, then picked the proposal by Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale. Third in line, by the way, was a bronze figure piece by former University of South Carolina student Frederick Hart. Following incredible controversy, Hart was tapped to put up three life-sized bronze soldiers near the Wall.

Architecture critic Filler and Lin’s objectors might have missed the whole point, in my mind, at least urbanistically, if that’s a word. What most observers fail to see is the context of the site.

In his original street plan for Washington, 1790, designer L’Enfant included the National Mall. L’Enfant’s design guide, the pathways behind Versailles outside Paris, had a mall very much like what surfaced for Washington. The Washington Monument in L’Enfant’s plan was at the crossing to two linear vistas, an axis running north-south from the president’s house to what became the Jefferson Memorial and another axis running east-west between the nation’s capitol and what became the Lincoln Memorial.

The Washington Monument, designed by South Carolina’s Robert Mills, had to be moved east off the north-south axis in favor of higher ground for firmer footings. Still, the Washington Monument is on line with the capitol’s central axis. Which is the same coming east from the Lincoln Memorial.

When Maya Lin first looked at the proposed site for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial  – and this is strictly a guess – she probably thought the Vietnam veterans got shafted, pushed aside, as it were, from the main axis down the center of the National Mall. These fellows fought hard, just like the WWII veterans, soon to be called The Greatest Generation by Brokaw’s book – and they deserved to be lined up between President Washington and President Lincoln.

Which is what Maya Lin did. She put the 58,000+ on two wings, one pointing to President Washington and the other pointing to President Lincoln, giving the Vietnam veterans their due, having fought America’s most unpopular war. They were the ostracized young. Like all wars, they died young: More than 25,000 died at age 20 or younger.

I applied unsuccessfully for architecture school at Yale in the fall of ’74. They invited me up for an interview and for a day’s visit. I wandered the campus, but my meetings were all in the art and architecture building by architect and former dean Paul Rudolph. The building was going through an outrageously expensive asbestos removal by the “wet method,” soaking the unwanted material until it dropped off.

Maybe someone was offended by my wet method humor, but when two interviewers asked me to recall any of my past that might contribute to a self-definition, I cited my military experience, Vietnam and all. Oh no, they both said, you don’t want to tell us that.

Yale didn’t fight, neither did Harvard – none of them did. I was in the combat zone for 18 months, and never did I meet a man who said he was Ivy League. I guess they kept their NYR hidden folded up inside a Playboy.

So there’s special irony for me in seeing Ms. Lin, Yale’s own, win the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design competition. And to figure out how to include the Vietnam dead with their band of brothers all along the National Mall, directly connecting with President Washington and President Lincoln, well, that’s pure genius.