Vietnam Veterans Memorial

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial occupies a two-acre site on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., designed by Maya Lin, then a twenty-one-year-old Yale architecture student, whose entry won a national design competition in 1981. Completed in 1982, the memorial takes the form of two long, polished black granite walls set into the earth in a shallow V, inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 United States service members killed or listed as missing in the Vietnam War. Its stark, minimalist design departed sharply from traditional heroic war memorials and drew intense controversy when first unveiled, before becoming one of the most visited monuments in the capital. Visitors commonly leave mementos at the wall and take pencil rubbings of inscribed names, practices that have become part of the memorial's ongoing use.