Essay on Vietnam Veterans Memorial Hall: Honoring Sacrifices of U.S. Service Members

Introduction

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial hall is a national memorial in Washington, D.C. It celebrates U.S. service members of the U.S. armed forces who battled in the Vietnam war, further, service members who succumbed in Vietnam/ South East Asia, and those services who were missing in action during the war (The National Parks 1). The wall receives about 3.6 million tourists annually. Its construction and related subjects have been the source of hullabaloos, that led to the establishment of the memorial complex. (Kurzynski 224). The memorial wall comprises three distinct parts; the Three Soldiers Statue, the Vietnam Women's Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Hall. The pivotal section of the memorial wall was finalized in 1982, and it was designed by Maya Lin. The architecture of the initial 58,170 names on the wall was performed by Datalantic in Atlanta, Georgia (Kurzynski 224).

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The main objective of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is to make sure a community in which all who have provided essential services and sacrificed in the American Armed forces are appropriately honored and receive the recognition they truly deserve. The VVMF is currently placing its memorial on a global scale through the virtual wall of faces. The tourists to the wall are generally struck by the utter size of the memorial, mainly because each panel only contains names, and not unit data (Kurzynski 224). Each of the veteran's profiles provides a foretaste into their life story including their photo, rank, date of birth, and home of record. Even though the memorial wall has a significant influence on visitors, there are also inner inadequacies as well. For example, since it is situated in Washington it might disadvantage many Americans, especially the aging, and frailing generation of Vietnam veterans (Kurzynski 225). While the magnitude of the Wall is significant, the lack of finner details shows there is so much behind each name displayed that is lost in the brevity (The National Parks 2-3). Nevertheless, the memory wall helps Americans to overcome two main challenges. It augments the accessibility to many citizens who would not otherwise be able to learn the history of the memorial, and it restores a substantial amount of humanity missing the stone carving (Kurzynski 226).

In the statue of The Three Soldiers, both the statue and the wall sem to contact each other, with the soldiers looking on in a somber tribute at the names of their fallen compatriots (The National Parks 4). The distance between the two permits them to interact while reducing the effect of the added statue on Lin's architectural design (The National Parks 4). The Women's Memorial was designed by Glenna Goodacre as a reflection of those women who served as nurses during the Vietnam war. In the statue, the woman who is gazing up is named Hope, the one who is praying is named Faith, and the woman tending to an injured soldier is named Charity (The National Parks 4). The Memory Memorial Plaque takes a shape of a carved block of black granite, which serves a memory of men and women who served in the Vietnam War and later succumbed while in the line of duty (The National Parks 5).

The Significance of the Poem "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa

Facing It is a poem that provides personal angst of the speaker, a Vietnam veteran, who is touring the Vietnam War Memorial situated in Washington DC (Baldwin n.p). The poem also examines how the memories derived from the black wall impacts the lives of young black soldiers, struggling to cope in a new nation. The speaker was born in 1947 and spent most of his life serving as a war correspondent in Vietnam, witnessing and reporting on the bloody war for Supremacy in the mid-1960s (Baldwin n.p).

Facing It provides a personal narrative through its 31 lines (Baldwin n.p). In the first two lines, an image is created of a black person's reflection vanishing into black granite. The speaker might be conversing with himself as he glances into the black stone. The third and fourth stanzas provide a deeper personal insight (Baldwin n.p). The speaker is disintegrated psychically, one on end he is as tough as the granite, and at other times he is as weak and subtle as flesh. In Lines 10-16, the speaker realizes that he is in front of 58,000 names of soldiers who succumbed in the war, and is perplexed by the manner the light moves on the granite (Baldwin n.p).

While scrolling down the names he is "half expecting to find (his) own in letters like smoke," which means he feels as if his name should have been alongside those he recognized in Vietnam, since he had participated in the war (Baldwin n.p). In lines 17-24, the speaker in the poem flashbacks on specific memories of his time in Vietnam. In these lines, the narrator speaks of "Andrew Johnson", and remembers how he saw a "booby trap" flash white as it killed him (Baldwin n.p). He reminisces deeper into the memory and starts to examine the reflections of others. He also links the dull features of a "woman's blouse" and a "red bird" to the intensity of the Vietnam War. In lines 25-31, the penultimate image that the narrator sees is that of a woman who looks to be "trying to erase names;" however, it is not the case, as the speaker selects these ordinary and simple images to demonstrate the difference between the perspective at home, and the experiences gained from the war (Baldwin n.p).

How is Yusef Komunyakaa War Experiences Reflected in the War Memorial?

The fact that Yusef Komunyakaa served as a war correspondent in Vietnam, witnessed and reported on the bloody war for Supremacy in the mid-1960s allows him to provide clear imagery and reflection of first-hand experiences that relate to the War Memorial to the young black and American soldiers serving effortlessly for the Great United States of American through different poems including the one being discussed "Facing It." Yusef Komunyakaa also centers on the main motifs of his poem, on a backdrop where "the truth can survive" the angst fragmenting experiences of the Vietnam war (Moore 11).

In his second poem "Facing It" Komunyakaa confronts his conflicted emotions about Vietnam, its achievements, and even more deeply the role Black race plays in America while visiting the Memorial wall (Ekiss n.p). Just like Maya Lin, whose main objective was to design a Memorial Wall for the Vietnam Veterans, Yusef Komunyakaa's poem explains the effects and costs of the war, like the discrimination of the African Americans due to their black skin color. In "Facing It", and most of his poems, the speakers divulge the difficulties of race relations among American soldiers (Ekiss n.p). Even though he was included in the voluntary military war, many American men were called up for mandatory military service through a draft program. These agenda discriminated against Black men, and those who managed to proceed to the war were treated as low-status soldiers as they were barely honored as the White soldiers who had died in that horrible battle. However, advanced antagonism and political campaigns led to policy changes that plummeted the racial prejudices in battle deaths by the period Yusef Komunyakaa got in Vietnam.

Does the to Yusef Komunyakaa Response to the Memorial Indicate that the Conception and Composition of the Memorial were Successful or Unsuccessful as a Public Memorial?

Yusef Komunyakaa's reaction to the Memory Indicates that the conception and conception of the Memorial were successful as the names of the fallen soldiers etched on the wall would be honored properly without regarding whether they were from a black race or not. The poem "Facing It" has also focused on human and material losses that Americans suffered in the war. The Americans devoted over decades to the Vietnam War, deployed more than three million military soldiers to fight in the battle. The horrible occurrences of the Vietnam war have made it hard for America to establish a shared memory about the significance of the war, and this became the case after the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Hall, where the fallen soldiers and women would be recognized and honored for the selfless acts they displayed in Vietnam war. The idea of creating structures for such significant memories is a pivotal form of the sociology of culture since it aligns with the way society reflects past events (Ozoke 3). The walls of Vietnam Veterans Memorial functions as a monitor for many projections about the history of the Vietnam war itself and its consequences.

On the other hand, Yusef Komunyakaa did not accept the war and pondered on leaving his army post instead of engaging, but later decided "bearing witness" was more significant. Because he did not like how the Black soldiers were being discriminated against in participating in the voluntary battle in Vietnam. Opponents of the erection of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall indicated that the soldiers were vilified for the selfless services they rendered to Vietnam on behalf of their nation, as they got little support from the then US President Nixon. For example, Nixon's administration did not provide burial services for the soldiers who succumbed to the war as they had in past wars, where survivors could "find consolation in ritual, and traditional funerals" (Coffey 4). Therefore the erection of the wall with the names of the soldiers is an irony of how the government treated this soldier while they arrived, and failed to provide them a decent send-off in the wake of their death (Coffey 5).

Works Cited

Baldwin, Edwin. " Facing It by Yusef komunyakaa." Poem Analysis. https://poemanalysis.com/yusef-komunyakaa/facing-it

Coffey, Cindy. "The Things They Carried." (2014). https://www.academia.edu/38431146/The_Things_They_Carried_The_Vietnam_Veterans_Memorial_and_American_Memory

Ekiss, Robin. " Yusef Komunyakaa: Facing It." Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69414/yusef-komunyakaa-facing-it

Kurzynski, Krysta. "Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall of Faces." Journal of Veterans Studies 1.1 (2016): 224-228. file:///C:/Users/User/Downloads/44-57-1-PB.pdf

Moore, A., Megan. "Vietnam War Poetry: Constructing a Cohesive Text From Fragments of Experience. 1-44 (1998). https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1049&context=uhp_theses

Ozoke, Vitus. "Shades of Memory: Reflections on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial." 1-7. (2015). http://www.aijcrnet.com/journals/Vol_5_No_2_April_2015/1.pdf

The National Parks. "Vietnam Veterans Memorial." 1-11. (2011). https://resources.saylor.org/wwwresources/archived/site/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/Vietnam-Veterans-Memorial.pdf