News, Offerings Still Pile Up for Vietnam Vets. (Washington: middle school, golf)

[John1960]

WASHINGTON — They are lined up like footnotes to the names etched on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial's polished black granite, leaning against its base, some a collective tribute to the fallen, others bearing a message for just one of the dead.

An American Legion uniform cap from Kansas, a police patch from a town in Georgia, a note to "GRAMDADAD" that appears to have been written by the unpracticed hand of a young child. A homemade plaque with plastic red poppies pasted to it, dedicated to a "Band of Brothers." Poems from middle school students.

"We met once when you played golf with my dad," reads one note, written hastily on a piece of yellow notebook paper, addressed to a Major Shaw. "You served together in Vietnam. He made it back to us. I'm saying goodbye."

Since the memorial was completed in 1982, it has become a de facto shrine with more than 100,000 offerings for the dead and messages from survivors left by the millions who visit it each year.

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[saganista]

Interesting that Maya Lin's monument has worked out as it has given the sharp right-wing criticism of it early on. Not lofty enough...a dark scar cut into the earth that would serve to memorialize only of the baseness and bitterness of that conflict. It seems that some tunes have been changed since those days...