Am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. Okay, let's bango. Hello, and welcome to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. My name is Lindsay, and uh, fun fact, I was not supposed to record this episode today. I was supposed to record it tomorrow. In fact, at this very moment, I should, I repeat, should, be pulling into my parents' driveway after an eight-hour drive from St. Louis to Wisconsin. But alas, that drive only lasted six hours today. Three north, three south. Because someone, me, forgot her dang wallet. So that's just delightful. But we shall try again tomorrow. Apart from that mishap, I am very excited to be recording today's episode because that means, do-do-do! I have finally finished that big school thing that I was working on. Or at least I finished it for the moment. So I'm taking a little break to record an episode of the podcast and to visit home if I ever get there, before I throw myself into the 10,000 other things that I need to do. Such is life, my friends. For today's episode, I thought that the podcast could use a little bit more lady power. Because I, Lindsay, cannot be personally responsible for being the sole provider of lady power in this endeavor. I need help. And it just so happens that my selection of artists and artwork today venture into some other uncharted territories for the podcast as well. For example, the late 20th century, the United States memorials. I like how I'm trying to build up suspense for something that you have clearly already seen in the episode's title. Without further ado, today I will be talking to you about Maya Lin and the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D period C period. I initially had a very different topic picked for this episode. The Vietnam War Memorial was not even on my list of topics that I wanted to do, but for some reason this past week it popped into my head, and I thought, yeah, I'm gonna do that. So here I am. I can't explain exactly why I decided to do this because as you've probably noticed, I like to insert a little bit of fun and sassiness into episodes, but this one promises to be a little bit more serious because war. But it's an important topic and one that I find as fascinating as I find it heartbreaking. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. is precisely what its name suggests. It is a memorial that commemorates the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, which was a war that occurred over the course of 20 years between 1955 and 1975. Now, in order to discuss the memorial, I do think it's fitting to first discuss the war that the memorial, you know, memorializes. I'm not going to go into a crazy amount of detail, but what I do want to do is give you enough historical background to set the scene for the creation of the memorial, which was a contentious, sometimes even cruel process that involved a lot of emotion, a lot of opinions, and a lot of misunderstanding. Much like the Vietnam War itself. I am only 28 years old, which means that I was, what, like negative 15 when the war in Vietnam ended. So I do not claim to understand the war from an internal perspective. I, of course, did not serve in the war, no one in my immediate family served active duty overseas, and there are no names on the Vietnam War Memorial that I would ever know to seek out. That being said, the Vietnam War is a lot closer to my present than, say, World War II, which I sadly think is starting to fade from our collective consciousness, at least when it comes to our daily lived experiences. Of course, there are many people my age whose families were forever changed by World War II, especially with the Holocaust. But World War II isn't present in our daily lives anymore. Given that only about 4% of World War II veterans are still living, my generation doesn't tend to see World War II veterans at the mechanics or in the supermarket aisles. We tend to hear and learn about World War II from textbooks and TV, rather than from stories shared around the dinner table. And that's scary because as these things become more distant, more the stuff of history books and close to the heart memories, that's when we start to ignore the lessons that we've learned and we start to fall back into old routines. And I think that one could argue that that is happening, and that's terrifying. With Vietnam, that hasn't happened yet. And I hope it never will, because many people in the United States would have preferred to forget the Vietnam War altogether, for reasons I'll discuss shortly. And it's only in the past 10, maybe 20 years or so that Vietnam has become a subject of wider conversation, and that Vietnam veterans have been appreciated in a way that they weren't when they came home from the war several decades ago. And unfortunately, many soldiers never did return home, as we shall see. Now that statement alone should give you enough forewarning that this episode will probably be pretty depressing. Just as researching it was super depressing. Because, you know, war. But I do hope that it will be interesting, educational, and even touching. Because I was very touched as I researched and wrote this episode, and I don't tend to have human feelings very often. Beep boop, beep boop, robot. I'm kidding. Nothing, like literally nothing, hits me in the feels quite as much as watching videos of veterans coming home to their families. And let's be real, they're doggies. I am in no way qualified to be giving medical advice of any sort, but I will say that if you don't feel anything when you watch those YouTube videos of soldiers coming home, then you need to get thyself to a doctor to get your heart checked, because yours seems to be missing. On that note, the Vietnam War. As I said earlier, the Vietnam War lasted from about 1955 to 1975. It was fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, with the United States being the ally of South Vietnam. Geographically speaking, Vietnam as we know it today is a long, sort of parenthesis-shaped land thing bordered by Cambodia and Laos to the west and China to the north. So if you think about a map, or if you look at a map and you find India, you'll see that to the east of India, across the Bay of Bengal, there's another protrusion of land, protrusion. That land mass includes Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, and on the very eastern edge of that protrusion is Vietnam. And that, my friends, is where the Vietnam War took place. The Vietnam War, like most wars, is very complicated, both in its genesis as well as its duration. But it began following the events of another war, as you do. Up until 1954, Vietnam was part of a French colony known as Indochina. But, long story very, very short, the French lost control of that area for good in 1954, and the country that we now know as Vietnam split into two geography-based factions, North Vietnam in the north, and South Vietnam, you guessed it, in the South. North Vietnam was communist, and South Vietnam was something akin to a republic. Both North Vietnam and South Vietnam wanted to be in control of the entire country, which led to a civil war of sorts. And at this time, the 1950s, the United States government was not into communism. Like, I mean, I don't think that the United States was ever like super into communism. You have those weird people that you sometimes meet at cafes and stuff, but at this time, the United States was like super against communism. So President Dwight D. Eisenhower was like, hey, South Vietnam, you're doing good. We like that you're not communist. We are going to send you money and military advisors to help you win against those communists in North Vietnam, because we, the United States, do not like communists. And that is what begins the United States being involved in the Vietnam War. And it all just sort of escalated from there, particularly during the presidency of one John F. Kennedy, who believed that if Vietnam fell to communist rule, it would create a so-called domino effect in the region, with other countries in Asia also becoming communist. In the early 1960s, US presence in Vietnam increased by something like 10 times what it had been a few years before. At this point, from what I can understand, the Vietnam War was seen in the United States as being a righteous cause. Young men, and surely some young women, volunteered to go to Vietnam to serve the cause and fight on behalf of the South Vietnamese for the freedom that we in the United States enjoyed in our own country. It was all very patriotic, despite fighting this war on very foreign soil. But the war quickly became something else entirely. By the late 1960s, there were hundreds of thousands of US service people in Vietnam, and obviously the more boots on the ground, the more casualties, and nothing in Vietnam seemed to be improving. If anything, things were getting a lot worse. By the late 1960s, citizens in the U.S. had started to lose faith in what this war stood for, if they could even remember the purpose of it at all. It had been years since President Kennedy appealed to the patriotism of American soldiers to volunteer for a righteous war. Instead, the United States put the draft into full effect, forcing young men to go fight a war that no one really understood. Needless to say, anti-war sentiment grew rapidly. The Americans who went to Vietnam were forever changed by that experience, and not in a good way. Nearly 3 million American soldiers were sent to Vietnam during the war, and the average age of those soldiers was, get this, 19.1-9, 19. Can you imagine? That's nine years younger than I am right now, and I am not qualified to do anything. I don't think that anyone who went to the Vietnam War, or who goes to any war really, can ever really come home from that experience. At least you're not the same person that you were when you left. That would be impossible. Because you are called upon to do things and forced to see things that are just unspeakable. And of course, that was also true for the Vietnamese, especially the innocent victims of the war, of which there were hundreds of thousands. Now it's difficult to say in total how many people died in the war, because it's wartime that tends to happen, but the general consensus now is that over three million people died over the course of the war, and over 58,000 of those individuals were Americans. Skipping over a thousand different nuances about the war, all I'll say is that US involvement in Vietnam ended in 1973, though the war between North and South Vietnam continued until 1975, when South Vietnam officially fell to North Vietnam. Now war is bad enough when you win. It's much worse when you lose. And the United States had lost this war. In a series of polls taken between 1975 and 1980, around 70%, 770% of American citizens believed that the war in Vietnam was, quote, more than a mistake, fundamentally wrong and immoral. Others called it unjustified or simply, quote, the wrong thing. Can you imagine being a service person who came home only to be told by 70% of the people in the country that everything that you were through was part of not just a useless cause, but a mistaken one. The wrong thing. Fundamentally wrong and immoral. It is impossible for anyone other than those individuals who lived through that to imagine what it felt like. As I have heard a number of times from obsessively watching YouTube videos about flights of honor, which is like a personal weakness of mine, Vietnam War veterans were never welcomed home. And it would be many, many years before that perception started to change. Many Vietnam veterans recalled being spit on and called horrific names as they walked through the airport upon their arrival to U.S. soil. One Vietnam soldier recalled being so horrified and taken aback by the things that was said to him at the airport that he immediately went into the bathroom, took off his uniform, and threw it in the garbage. In 1979, a small group of veterans headed by a man named Jan Scruggs came together to form the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which was a nonprofit group whose aim it was to build a memorial to the war that everyone else seemed to want to forget. They, as a group of veterans, wanted to ensure that not only was the war remembered, but that every single one of the 58,000 plus Americans who died fighting in it were also remembered. Now, at first, very few people wanted to fund a memorial to a war that the majority of Americans thought was a disgrace. The efforts to get the monument built were even ridiculed on television by news correspondents and late-night comedians. But Jan Scruggs had the last laugh, as these platforms, even in their ridicule of his efforts, gave the project a platform. By February of 1980, he and a group of other veterans were appealing to members of Congress to build a memorial to the war between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The group stated very clearly that they wanted a memorial that was apolitical and served as a physical manifestation of remembrance and healing. The Vietnam Memorial Group managed to scrape up the support of 53 of a hundred senators to authorize the memorial. In the House of Representatives, only 62 out of 435 representatives endorsed the measure as of February 1980. For those of you who are bad at math, hello me. That's just 14% of the House of Representatives, though the bill would eventually pass through both the House and the Senate and eventually be signed by President Jimmy Carter on July 1st, 1980. A fun fact, I have a cousin who is personal friends with Mr. Jimmy Carter, despite the age difference between them being like about 110 years. My family is what you would call interesting. When President Carter signed the bill on July 1st, he said the following quote, a long and painful process has brought us to this moment today. Our nation was divided by war. For too long, we tried to put that division behind us by forgetting the Vietnam War, and in the process, we ignored those who bravely answered their nation's call. We are ready at last to acknowledge more deeply and also more publicly the debt which we can never fully repay to those who served. End quote. Jimmy Cotta, y'all. Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Jimmy Peanuts. Now that they have the approval of the Senate, the House, and El Presidente Carter, the Memorial Fund thought that they would need about $2.5 million to build the memorial. And they must be as bad at math as I am because they were about, you know, carry the one, da da da $7 million off. And it's strange that they even had an estimate about how much the memorial would cost because at this point they didn't even have a design yet. Which was what we call an issue. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund wanted a top architect to design and build the memorial, but they didn't know how to begin selecting one. So they worked around this very cleverly by turning this problem into a competition. And they put out a call for anyone who wanted to submit a design for the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial to do so. And that brings us to our leading lady of today's episode. I know you thought it was me, but it's not. In 1981, Maya Lin was a senior at Yale University majoring in architecture. And she and a few other students self-designed a course about funerary architecture. And one of those students saw a flyer advertising the Vietnam War Memorial Design Competition, and, you know, ripped it off the wall and ran to all his friends. And the students collectively decided that a design for the memorial would act as their final project for the course. The call for designs was not terribly specific in terms of what the fund wanted, but two aspects were made very clear. The design had to be apolitical, which is to say that it was not supposed to have any overt political message. And, two, it had to include the names of all 57,661 Americans killed during the Vietnam War. Now, as time has gone on, that number has changed slightly, but as of 1981, it was 57,661. Maya Lynn began her design very simply by asking herself a question. What is the purpose of a memorial at the close of the 20th century? Utilizing that question as a guide, Lin studied war memorials over the course of history, from ancient Greece to World War II. In Woolsey Hall at Yale University, there is a memorial rotunda that's inscribed with all of the names of Yale students that have died at war. When Maya Lynn was a freshman and a sophomore, stonecutters were in the process of adding all of the names of Yale students who had died at the Vietnam War. Lynne would later attribute a great deal of importance to the experience of seeing that process occur. It inspired her to think about names, the concept of a name, the importance of a name, especially as it relates to war memorials. Lynne was also inspired by another war memorial, the monument to missing soldiers of World War I Battles of the Psalm by Sir Edwin Luchens in Tia Paul, France. At that memorial, there is a massive archway that you can walk through before you encounter hundreds of white gravestones, primarily marking unidentified burials. One reason that Maya Lynn was so inspired by this memorial is that the archway bears the names of 72,246 men who died or went missing during the battles of the Somme during World War I, many of whose bodies were never formally identified due to the fact that dog tags had yet to be invented. Dog tags are, of course, the tags that soldiers wear around their neck, whose primary purpose is to make it possible to identify dead or wounded soldiers. At the battles of the Somme, most of those bodies never made it back to their homes. And so this archway essentially serves as a cemetery of those 70,000 plus soldiers. Their presence, which I'm putting in quotes, which is a fantastic thing to do in a purely auditory medium, their presence is now encapsulated in a name rather than a body. And that concept spoke to Lin. She decided that her memorial to the veterans of Vietnam would focus on the names themselves. One of Lin's first priorities for her memorial was to highlight the sacrifices inherent to war. And as an extension of that, to be honest. About death. Lynn believed that it was only after you accepted someone's death that you would be able to heal or move on, or whatever euphemism you choose to use to describe how one might survive after losing someone that they love so deeply. Like any good architect, Lynn traveled with her friends to Washington, DC to see the site where the memorial was supposed to go, which is like a garden slash park thing. Upon her arrival to the space, Lynn claimed that she immediately wanted to cut into the earth with a knife. Lynn would later talk about how as a child she was fascinated by geodes, which are when you cut open a rock and it's got all those lovely crystals inside of it. And her design for the Vietnam War Memorial was essentially a geode, as if the earth had been cut open to reveal its innards. For the final project for her class, Lynn drew up her designs using pastels. The design she created includes two walls of thin granite set into the earth below grade, which is to say below ground level, which forces visitors to enter into the space and become a part of it. One of the walls, I think it's the East Wall, but don't quote me, extends towards the Washington Monument, and the other, the West Wall, if I'm correct about the first one being the East Wall, extends towards the Lincoln Memorial. This signifies the bringing together of both history and country in the manner of Washington and Lincoln. The two walls meet at an apex or an angle, a portion of the memorial that will later become crucial to understanding the significance of its design, but one that was not fully realized at the time that Lynn submitted her project to her professor, who gave the project a B. And I will bet you that that professor felt pretty stupid that he gave a B to what would later become one of the world's most recognizable and famous memorials of basically all time. Lynn decided that she was going to take her project one step further and submit it to the memorial competition. Remember, the students decided to design a memorial for their final project in this self-made course, but nothing about that said that they had to submit it to the actual competition. As any enterprising student would, Maya Lynn thought, what the hell, send it in, thinking that nothing would ever come of it. I mean, her professor did give it a B. Before Lin sent in the project, she had to write an essay explaining her design. And later Lin would say that she knew the essay would be the thing to convince judges that her design was worth anything, much less winning. Because visually her design is extremely simple. It really just looks like a black triangle set into the ground. But Lynn's ideas for the memorial, what she imagined it stood for, and the things it could accomplish, were critical to understanding that simplicity. The thing is, Lynn left the writing of that essay to the final minute. And when I say final minute, I mean like last seconds. She actually ended up submitting a handwritten essay complete with misspellings and a couple of other mistake marks. I'll post an image of Lynn's design board on the podcast's website, StuffAbout Things, podcast.com, where you can see both her designs as well as her written essay. I'll also post a link to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which has published her essay in full. Lynn sent in her design to the competition, thinking of it as a good exercise as an architectural student. I'm of a similar mind. If there's a competition and you have something you know worthy to submit that you're proud of, you submit it, even if you don't think it has a chance in hell of winning. I mean, why not? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund ended up receiving, get this, 1,441 entries to the competition. They assigned each entry a number and eliminated any identifying information about the maker, other than an address to contact in the case that the designer won. So essentially it was blind judging in terms of who the maker was. Speaking of judging, for what might be the first time in history, a group of men decided that they had no idea what they were doing, and that they weren't qualified for something. And so the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund members decided to bring in a group of design professionals to select the design. The group, which was comprised of a couple of architects, a couple of landscape architects, and at least one sculptor, as well as a humanist, whatever that means, selected design number 1024. When they looked at the address on the back of the design board, one of the members of the judging group who had gone to Yale said, That's weird. I think that address is for the student dorms. On her final day of classes as a senior at Yale, Maya Lynn learned from her roommate that she had gotten a call from Washington, DC. Some people wanted to ask her about the design that she made for the memorial. And Lynn just assumed that that's exactly what they wanted. They wanted to ask her questions. But within a few days, she had three members of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in her dorm room. I repeat, in her dorm room. What the what? The three members of the Veterans Memorial Fund were there to tell Maya Lynn, the 21-year-old senior who had yet to graduate from college, that her design had been selected by the group of judges. She had won the competition. Her design would become the Vietnam War Memorial, and as a bonus, she would also get $20,000 with the prize money. Now, you might think, oh, well, Maya Lynn won the competition, and then her memorial got built, and that's what Lindsay's gonna say right now. Mmm no. Winning the competition was just the beginning for Maya Lynn. She would have to endure a year's worth of uproar over her identity and her design, and she would butt heads with nearly everyone, including the members of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, all in the name of preserving the integrity of her design for the memorial. On the day of her graduation, Lynn was taken to Washington, D.C. by car, as she was to be a part of the process of getting this design for the memorial approved by various government agencies, which was a necessary step in getting it built. It was in Washington, D.C. that Lynn would come face to face with many individuals who thought that her design was offensive, that a war memorial to Vietnam veterans should not be designed by a young Asian woman, even though Maya Lin had been born in Ohio. There is a brilliant documentary about Maya Lin called Maya Lin a Strong Clear Vision. And that documentary includes footage of one Vietnam veteran in particular who is just raging against Maya Lin's design for the memorial. And when I say raging, I do mean raging. The veteran essentially says that he felt worse and more offended when he saw Maya Lin's design for the memorial than he did when he got spit on at the airport after returning from Vietnam. And it's a difficult part of the documentary to watch because you feel bad for Maya Lin, who's 21 years old just sitting there taking this verbal lashing from this veteran. But you also feel bad for the veteran who clearly went through a horrific time when he got home from Vietnam. And it wasn't just this veteran who was offended. Maya Lin's design offended tens of thousands of people. To put it in the simplest of terms, Lin and her design had to run the gamut. In an essay that she wrote after the construction had begun on the memorial, Lin wondered if her design would have been selected if not for the blind judging. If the design proposal had said Maya Yang Lin instead of 1024, would things have turned out differently? It's difficult to say, though Lin later called the finished memorial a miracle, because for a long time she thought that it would never come to fruition. Again, no one wanted to see a Vietnam Veterans Memorial made by a 21-year-old Asian American woman, much less a design that many people equated to, quote, a black gash of shame. And you thought the B that her professor gave her was harsh. I mean, geez. One of the biggest challenges the memorial faced in its construction was that those who disliked the design demanded, and I am talking de mehanded, that a flagpole with the American flag and a statue of three soldiers in bronze be added to the apex of the monument, essentially making those elements the centerpiece of the design. Now Lynn fiercely argued against this, as she believed it would contradict the goals of her design as well as interrupt its stylistic integrity. Ultimately, the flagpole and the sculpture group were added to the site, but they were placed not at the apex of the memorial, but at the entry of the park. Lynn would later come to view these additions of the flagpole and the bronze group as memorials to the conflict and compromises that were inherent to the process of getting the memorial built in the first place, which I think makes her the bigger person here. Another aspect of the design that caused a great deal of controversy, controversy, if you will, was Lynn's decision to list the names of soldiers who died or went missing chronologically rather than alphabetically, beginning with the first man to die in the war and ending with the last. Critics, which is like basically everyone, argued that listing the names chronologically rather than alphabetically would make it extremely difficult for people to find the names of their loved ones on the wall. Lynn didn't agree. She believed that anyone visiting the wall would be willing to take an extra couple of minutes to consult an index of names provided and then seek out the corresponding slab. She further emphasized the critical importance of listing names chronologically by showing detractors a list of soldiers with the last name of Smith. There were literally hundreds of them, which, if you imagine them engraved on, you know, three different slabs, would create a sea of seemingly generic names that did absolutely nothing to individualize the soldiers being honored, which was the entire point of the memorial. But Lynn had yet to figure out how to best list the names on the two wings of the memorial. Do you go from one end to the other, right to left, left to right? She just didn't know what to do. Ultimately, though, she decided to create a loop of names so as to bring the war full circle. Now this is tricky, so bear with me as I explain. I will also post a diagram on the podcast's website to help you better conceptualize this looping of names, if you will. As you already know, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is comprised of two granite walls that meet at an angle. Each wall is comprised of 70 slabs of black granite that decrease in height so that each wall is the shape of a triangle. Now each one of those slabs has a corresponding number. So for example, 1e is the first slab of the east wall, while 70E is the last. Theoretically, let's say that you wanted to read the name of each and every soldier who died in Vietnam during the war in chronological order according to the date that they died or went missing. You would start at the center of the memorial, at the center angle, and you would look up to your right. That's slab 1e, which begins with the date 1959. You then begin to read the list of names moving from top to bottom of each slab until you reach the last name on slab 70E, at which point you're probably kneeling because this is the smallest pointy end, also known as an angle, of the triangular east wall. Once you're done reading that soldier's name and you want to continue reading in chronological order, you need to walk your body to the opposite end of the memorial, all the way to slab 70W, 70 West, which forms the tiny pointy end of the triangular west wall. Once again, you'd start reading left to right, top to bottom, moving towards the center of the memorial. When you get to the last name on slab 1W, you'll see the date 1975, which is the final year that an American died in Vietnam due to the war. At this point, you're back where you started. So if you look up, you find the date 1959 again at the top of 1E. Lin decided to arrange the names like this in order to signal that the war had come full circle, that it was now complete. But the arrangement of names does more than that. It unifies all 58,000 people who lost their lives during the war within the space of the memorial. There's really powerful footage of a veteran sobbing in front of the wall as he finds his friend's name. And he keeps saying something like, There are so many others, look at all the other names. And the wall has that effect. The names seem infinite. But ultimately, each one is part of something greater, meant to be appreciated both as an individual as well as part of a bigger time in our country's history. One that we hope is closed circuited and done. Not in terms of our memory of it or of the soldiers who died in the war, but in terms of not repeating the events that resulted in this massive loss of life. Now you might be thinking, well, this is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and yet it only represents the names of the dead. And that was one issue that many people had with the wall and may still have with the wall. Initially, it only seems to include, and I'm using the term only very loosely, it only seems to include the 58,000 individuals who died or went missing in the war, and not the 2.5 million who were able to return home. Maya Lin's choice of material for the wall went a long way to resolving that particular issue, though in doing so it also created an issue of its own. As with most aspects of the design, Lin had to fiercely defend her choice to utilize highly polished, almost mirrored dark granite slabs to create this memorial. Initially, the choice of black granite was highly controversial, with some people claiming that that represented the Vietnam War as this dark wound in America's history or something of the sort. Republican lawmakers even attempted to block the wall's construction if the design team did not agree to use white stone instead of black stone. But Lynn had a good reason for wanting to use dark granite. She claimed that the dark granite allowed the names engraved upon it to become the primary object of attention. Moreover, the mirror-like surface of the wall allows visitors to see themselves reflected in it. It's that reflective surface of the granite that allows visitors to be a part of the memorial, even as they are separate from it. You see yourself reflected against the granite, with your reflection interrupted by a series of names that just seem to progress endlessly across the wall. This is meant to be a powerful and cathartic experience that brings the viewer into the wall, making him or her a part of it. And based on a lot of reactions that you can see happening at the wall, it's certainly effective in doing just that. One of the unexpected facts that I learned while researching the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was that the selection of where to source the black granite was a deliberate and even symbolic decision. After all, Canada and Switzerland are two countries that have beautiful dark granite, the best dark granite, one could argue. But the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund members decided that it would be inappropriate to purchase granite from either of those countries, as Canada and Switzerland were two of the more popular destinations for draft dodgers during the war, those people who fled the country to avoid having to go to Vietnam. Ultimately, the building committee decided to get the granite from India. And I cannot even imagine what they paid in shipping. Oh my god. The Vietnam Veterans War Memorial was officially dedicated on Veterans Day in 1982. There was a parade, celebrations, if you could call them that, and speeches all day long. It was the first time that many Vietnam veterans felt that their service was being recognized, almost a decade after many of them had returned from the war. As of 2005, a nonprofit group called Honor Flight has joined the efforts to honor such veterans. Now I've referenced Honor Flight a couple of times in this episode. It's a program that flies veterans from their hometowns to DC to be able to see the memorials, meet up with other veterans, and be honored for their service. As of its beginnings in 2005, Honor Flight focused on honoring World War II veterans, but their scope has since expanded to veterans of both the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. Last year, I had the unexpected privilege of being on the same plane as a group of returning veterans participating in Honor Flight. Now I'll have to ask my friend Emily for details, but I am pretty sure that we were both sobbing in our plane seats as they went through announcements and handed out mail to the dozens of veterans on our flight. Most of them, from the sound of it, were Vietnam veterans. But the coolest thing about Honor Flight is the homecoming. Crowds of people, like dozens and dozens of people, gather at airports with signs and they blast music. And as the veterans come through the arrivals gate, they cheer and they offer hugs and handshakes to these men who returned home 40 years ago only to be spit on. And it's so touching to see just what that experience means to these individuals who've waited for that for 40 years. And although it'll never make amends for things that weren't done in the past, I would say better late than never. Many of the veterans who return from Honor Flight lament the fact that their friends and family members never got the chance to be welcomed home, either because they've since passed away or because their names are engraved on the wall that many of the returning honor flight veterans visited earlier in the day. Those veterans may have even participated in the tradition that has developed called rubbing, which references the act of taking paper, placing it over a name, and running chalk or pencil over it, thus creating a tracing of a name for you to keep. Many visitors to the wall also place flowers, meaningful objects, and letters at the wall. For anyone who's wondering, all of those items are collected by park staff and non-perishable items are placed in storage. As for Maya Lin, on her first visit to the Vietnam Veterans War Memorial, she went to the nearby registry books and sought out the name of a friend's father who had died in the war. She then found his name on the proper slab and ran her fingers over it as she attempted to come to terms with what it meant to have the name of someone you love up on that wall. She also took in the magnitude of all of those names that surrounded it. And it was in that moment that Maya Lynn realized that she was utilizing the wall exactly as she, its designer, had intended. Now I can't speak for Maya Lynn, but I would think that that was a very powerful, moving, and memorable moment in her life. That is where I will leave Maya Lynn and the Vietnam War Memorial. As always, I will post appropriate links and sources and images and all sorts of stuff on the podcast's website, including the websites of Maya Lynn and the Memorial, where you can go and read more about it and even search out names, because now we have the internet, which is really cool. If you're looking to smile after this rather heavy like 45 minutes, drunk history did a segment on Maya Lynn and the creation of the memorial. And let's face it, y'all, drunk history is my favorite type of history. And yes, drunk history is exactly what it sounds like. Someone, usually a celebrity or comic, gets drunk and tells you about history, which is marvelously acted out and lip-synced by various actors, many of whom you might recognize. It's delightful. Maybe not entirely accurate to the story, but it's mostly accurate. And let me reiterate this. It's delightful. I just watched it again now, and it made my heart really happy, which I needed. So I'll link to that. And y'all, please drink responsibly. Also, please history responsibly. As for Gus Corner this week, I haven't seen Gus for about four weeks, and I'm super pumped to drive home for the second time tomorrow to see him. And boy, my dad was sending me pictures. That dog is handsome. He's so handsome. Earlier this week, Gus got a bath in the backyard, and he is now soft and silky silky smooth. And I'm sure he even smells lightly of the VO5 shampoo and hose water that such baths entail. For this episode, Gus infiltrated four famous works of art: Man with a Red Turban by Jan van Eyck, Cindy Sherman's Film Still number 21, Velazquez's Las Meninas, and A Pastel of Ballet Dancers by Edgar Degas. Gus and I hope that you enjoy those images. That's all from me this week. I will have another episode up in two to three weeks, and I am sure of that, because I have got a very special topic planned for the 10th episode. Special to me anyway, and I look forward to recording that after I get another big thing done for school. And that big thing is coming up quick, so I'm going to sign out for today and get back to getting stuff done. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. I hope that you enjoyed it and learned a lot from the episode. As always, a big thanks to my music providers, hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org. The songs that you hear at the beginning and end of the episode are a version of Box Brandenburg Concerto number 4 by Kevin McLeod and a track called Success Dream. With that, I am over and out. I will talk to you very soon. And don't forget to look at something beautiful today. Might I suggest a picture of Gus on the podcast's website, maybe? A la próxima amici.
unknownBye.