Between Life and Death

While she was still a student in college, Maya Lin won the Vietnam memorial design competition for Washington DC. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/MayaLinsubmission.jpg Her competition entry is unusual in that she spent 1 month on thr design and more than 5 months hand writing an essay which she attached to her boards. Without experiencing war herself, it was amazing 21 year old Maya was able to design a landscape that expressed the feeling of loss from the war. This was a war that America had no reason to fight in. 60,000 Americans died, and countless more Vietnamese died on the other side. It was a ideological failure in that there was no justification for it. Protests about its immorality prompted mass demonstrations in the US during the 1960s. Eventually the losses mounted and America pulled out. 


How do you express and respect this tremendous loss of life, and reflect on this deadly politically driven failure? Since there was no glory in Vietnam, Maya left no physical object to represent this war above ground, instead the memorial sits like a scar carved into the landscape. The exposed cut in the land is conceived with a super thin piece of granite polished like a geode. When you first enter, the polished black granite walls are no higher than a sidewalk curb. The names of fallen soldiers are etched into the stone in the chronological order that they fell. As you descend deeper along the ramp by the wall, more and more names fill the walls till you suddenly find yourself at the vertex. This gradual descent mirrors America’s gradual military escalation in Vietnam. At first, the war was a few skirmishes to aid the French... then it gradually became a more entangled gory  jungle guerilla battle with viet cong ambushes. At the vertex, the walls reach 10 feet high and you are suddenly surrounded by all the names...it’s overwhelming to see so many names, each one representing a life and dream extinguished too early. Looking through the polish of the stone is like looking into Hades... the dead are within view but cannot escape their fate. Their presence is pressed up against the stone in the form of their names. The reflective quality of the granite is such that you see the reflections of the Washington monument and capitol buildings as you look at the names. The names of the fallen are intertwined with the reflections of the symbols of the American power that sent their poor souls to fight this needless war. I have never experienced such a strong political statement, or spiritual expression of the boundary between life and death.