To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

This moving, inspiring, and beautifully illustrated book tells the inside story of the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in our nation's capital. It also includes, in an appendix in the back, the names of the 58,000 Americans who lost their lives in Southeast Asia during the war - the names that are inscribed on the Memorial's granite walls. Jan C. Scruggs, who was wounded in Vietnam, conceived of the idea for the Memorial while doing graduate work in psychology and studying the war's impact on Vietnam veterans. Money for the project was raised entirely by subscription, and a design competition was won by a young Chinese-American student, Maya Ying Lin. Her stunningly simple concept, which one critic has already called the great American work of art for this century - two polished granite walls in the shape of a V, one pointing toward the Washington Monument and the other toward the Lincoln Memorial, inscribed with the names of the dead - now stands on Washington's Mall, where thousands of people visit it every week. Since the wall was completed and opened to the public in November 1982, a bronze flagpole and an eight-foot statue of three infantrymen, designed by sculptor Frederick Hart, have been added to the site. Some observers have said it seems as though the soldiers are searching for their own names on the Memorial. Both the Memorial itself and this story of how it came to be are remarkable testaments to the Americans who served and to those who died in the Vietnam War, and to the fact that in America one individual's dream, no matter how difficult, can still come true.