When the design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in 1981, some people praised its healing qualities, its accessibility, and its quiet power. Others called it a black bat, a boomerang, a hole in the ground. One vexed vet lost his cool before the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and branded it nothing but a big, black scar. "It's insulting and demeaning," he snarled. .
The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. was one of the most bitterly disputed public monuments in American history. The design created a political firestorm, which may have had more to do with the festering wounds of the war than with the artwork. .
Jan Scruggs, an army rifleman in Vietnam, was the man who conceived the campaign to build a memorial to honor Vietnam Veterans. After watching the movie," The Deer Hunter" in 1979, he decided to devote himself to finding away to bring about his plan. He wanted a memorial; he had little interest in a work of art.
The people that planned the memorial were the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, hired professionals, to run the design competition. They specified in advance many features for which Lin's work is admired. .
They envisioned a mostly horizontal, contemplative work that did not disrupt the landscape of Constitution Gardens, the area in the Mall that was designated as the site. The competition guidelines stipulated that the monument "make no political statement regarding war and its conduct" and that it include the names of all 57,661 Americans who died in the war. (More names have been added since). Lin's design was the unanimous choice of the competition jurors, in part because it seemed so uncannily to fit the criteria the planners had in mind.
Many issues drove the controversy. "Because I wore my hair long and didn't pay attention to fashion, people considered me a sixties hippie," said Lin. "They connected me with anti-war and sixties radicals." She was also, of course a woman, a very young woman of twenty-one years, and her parents were Asian; how could she possibly know what would be a good memorial for our nations heroes.
