 We're standing right in front of the World War II Memorial. How many of you have visited it before? Okay, great. I want to talk a little bit about why it's here and what it looks like and then give you some time to explore a little bit. But I don't think you can really understand why the Memorial looks the way that it does without knowing a little bit about a totally different Memorial, the Vietnam War Memorial. So how many of you have been to the Vietnam War Memorial? Great. Just about everybody. What have your experiences been? Very somber. Somber? Absolutely. Pardon me? Dark? I want dark. Yeah, no. I mean, it's somber. It's dark. Yeah, I mean, it draws you in. It can be incredibly emotional because it has become a destination point for a lot of people who served in the Vietnam conflict. People leave things there. They'll take rubbings of people they knew. It's interactive in a way that not many Memorials are. It has its own really interesting story. The story of the Vietnam Memorial goes back to the mid-70s. It was a project started by a veteran of the Vietnam conflict who saw the movie Dear Hunter, which took him back to his own experiences fighting in the war. And he said he stayed up all night and then the next morning he told his wife that he was going to dedicate himself to raising money for a Memorial to the people that he had served with in Vietnam. The monument that you think of as the Vietnam Memorial, which is the wall, that V-shaped wall that sort of starts low and rises to a peak of I think six or seven feet and has the names inscribed on it, is actually only one of three Vietnam Memorials that are in the same place. And in 2012 we know this as one of those moving monuments, a place where people will come from across the country to connect with it. It was incredibly controversial at first. And that's a part of the story that we often tune out, but it has a backstory. So as they raised money, they began to solicit designs for the Memorial. And I talked to you guys this morning when we were at the Grant Memorial and we've talked a lot of times about all sorts of historical sources that things are made. They don't just appear and they're designed by a person or a committee who wants to get an idea out there. The Vietnam Memorial was a little unusual in that they opened a design contest nationally. And somewhat atypically they did the jury review blind. So you, architecture, you know, architects and designers could put forth a plan for what the Memorial might look like and then they submitted it. They all went out to like a big hangar at Dulles Airport. But all the information about who had designed it and who they were and what their background was was all stripped off so that the judges were only looking at the idea itself. And the design that you know of as the design was one of the last two dozen and then the last nine and then the last three and it was ultimately the one that was selected. And the selection and the unveiling of the design before it was even built went off like a bombshell. And one of the groups that was most opposed to it was Vietnam War veterans. They were opposed to a number of things. One was the design of it. It is a somber Memorial. It is black. It is anti-heroic I think in some ways. Did anybody as we were walking over here on Constitution, happened to look over at the statue of the gold arm holding up a sword with flames? Okay, so what was that? Anybody catch it? It was a monument to the Second Infantry Division and its losses in the First World War. And so you saw the arm holding up the flaming sword and then a list of all the battles that the Second Division fought in. That's much more of a kind of typical classic war Memorial. You know you put up a leader or you put up you know something you know a lion or an eagle or reeds or something that has classical overtones and celebrates the heroism and that is not what the Vietnam Memorial is. And it was designed very specifically. The designer said you know that the design was intended to get people to interact with it. It has the names of all the people that were killed during the decade or so of the conflict. How are they organized? The middle is the earliest and it goes out. They're organized chronologically in the order that the people died. So you cannot go and just alphabetically find the person you want to find. That design forces you to look at a lot more of it than you would if you could just go right to the person you were looking for. You have to look over all of the names or a lot more of the names and it forces you to engage with it. What's the finish like? Can anybody remember? The finish of the black marble is highly reflective. So as you're looking at the names you can also see your own face reflected in it. That's by design too. None of this was done accidentally. And it encourages you to put yourself in the middle of these people to think about the sacrifice and to think about it in very personal terms. The other thing that became a big issue with the design was the identity of the designer itself. Her name was Maya Lin. She was a 20-year-old Yale architecture student so she was very young to win such a prestigious national competition. She was female and she was Asian. And none of those things sat particularly well with a vocal group of Vietnam veterans who felt that everything about the memorial was wrong. The location of it, the tone of it, the somberness of it and you can absolutely see where they're coming from. If you look around at most war memorials and you see that they celebrate heroism and glory and sacrifice, you might think this is not how I want my time, my conflict to be remembered. This isn't what I want people thinking about. That was a really legitimate point but it opens up this whole question of who is the memorial for?