The "Wall" as it is commonly called, was completed in1982, and is just one of three parts of the memorial. In 1984, the Three Servicemen Statue was added, and the more recent Vietnam Woman's Memorial was dedicated in 1993.
A wounded Vietnam veteran, Corporal Jan Scruggs created the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and raised 8 point 4 million dollars from private donations to establish a memorial to honor the thousands of men and women who lost their lives in the conflict. No federal funds were used in the construction of the monument.
A competition was held to select the design of the memorial with over fourteen hundred entries submitted to win a prize of Fifty-five thousand dollars. The winning entry was submitted by Maya Lin, a then twenty one year old Yale University student from Athens, Ohio.
Maya Linn conceived her design as a quiet protective place, unto itself, and yet harmonious with its surroundings. To achieve this effect, she chose polished black granite for the wall. Its mirror like surface reflects the surrounding trees, lawns, monuments and the people looking for the names. The east end of the wall points to the Washington Monument, the west toward the Lincoln Memorial.
The more then 58,000 names are inscribed in the order of the date of the casualty, showing the war as a series of individual human sacrifices and giving each name a special place in history. Lin said, "the names would become the memorial."
The names begin at the top of the middle panel on the wall, and move to the east and the Wahington Monument, and then continiue at the far west, close to the Lincoln Memorial, eventually meeting back in the middle. At the bottom of the last panel in the middle is the date, 1975, remebering that it was April 30, 1975 when the last American service person died in Vietnam.
Each name is preceded on the west wall, or followed on the east wall by one of two symbols: a diamond or a cross. The diamond indicated that the person's death was confirmed. The approximately 1,150 persons whose names are designated by the cross were either missing or were prisoners at the end of the war and remain missing or unaccounted for.
