Admission: Free
Monument Hours: Open 24 hours a day
Staffed 8:00 AM - Midnight

Establishing the Memorial
On July 1, 1980, Congress authorized a site in Constitution Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial thereby providing the prominent, large parklike setting that the organizers had hoped to find. That fall it was announced that the memorial's design would be selected through a national competition open to any U.S. citizen 18 years of age or older. The 1,421 design entries submitted were judged anonymously by a jury of eight internationally recognized artists and designers. On May 1, 1981, the jury presented its unanimous selection for first prize. The winning design was the work of Maya Ying Lin of Athens, Ohio, who at the time was a 21-year-old student at Yale University. The following January it was determined that a flagstaff and figurative sculpture depicting fighting men in Vietnam would be added to the memorial site. Washington sculptor Frederick Hart was selected to design the sculpture of the servicemen.
On March 11, 1982, the memorial's design and plans received final approval, and ground was formally broken on March 26. Construction of the walls was completed in late October and the memorial was dedicated November 13, 1982. The life-size sculpture was installed in the fall of 1984. On November 11 of that year, the President accepted the completed memorial on behalf of the Nation. The $7,000,000 cost of establishing the memorial was raised entirely through contributions from corporations, foundations, unions, veterans, civic organizations, and more than 275,000 individual Americans.

"Names Would Become the Memorial"
Maya Ying Linn conceived her design as creating a park within a park -- a quiet protected place unto itself, yet harmonious with the site. To achieve this effect she chose polished black granite for the walls. Its mirror like surface reflects the surrounding trees, lawns, monuments, and the people looking for names. The memorial's walls point to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The 58,191 names are inscribed in chronological order of the date of the casualty, showing the war as a series of individual human sacrifices and giving each name a special place in history. "The names would become the memorial," Lin said.
The names begin at the vertex of the walls below the date of the first casualty and continue to the end of the east wall. They resume at the tip of the west wall, ending at the vertex, above the date of the last death. With the meeting of the beginning and the ending, a major epoch in American history is denoted. Each name is preceded on the west wall or followed on the east wall by one of two symbols: a diamond or a cross. The diamond denotes that the individual's death was confirmed. The approximately 1,150 persons whose names are designated by the cross were either missing or prisoners at the end of the war and remain missing and unaccounted for. If a person returns alive, a circle, as a symbol of life, will be inscribed around the cross. In the event an individual's remains are returned or is otherwise accounted for, the diamond will be superimposed over the cross.

Some Facts About the Memorial
The walls are 246.75 feet long and the angle at the vertex is 125 degrees 12 minutes. There are 140 pilings with the average depth to bedrock being 35 feet. The height of the walls at the vertex is 10.1 feet. The granite comes from Bangalore, India; it was cut and fabricated at Barre, Vermont. The names were grit-blasted in Memphis, Tennessee, with the height of the individual letters being 0.53 inch and the depth, 0.038 inch.

Additional Information:

http://www.nps.gov/vive/