The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated on November 13, 1982, after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund had chosen Maya Ying Lin’s design. Lin was an architecture student at Yale University when she submitted her proposal for the memorial, to be built in Washington D.C.’s Constitution Gardens as a tribute to those who served in the Vietnam War. In her proposal, shown above, Lin described ‘a long, polished, black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth,’ which would include the names of all the military personnel who had died or remained missing. According to Lin, ‘these names, seemingly infinite in number, [would] convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.’
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