The Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C. was one of the most bitterly disputed public monuments in American history. The design created a political firestorm, which may have had more to do with the festering wounds of the war than with the artwork.

Jan Scruggs, an army rifleman in Vietnam, was the man who conceived the campaign to build a memorial to honor Vietnam Veterans. After watching the movie,” The Deer Hunter” in 1979, he decided to devote himself to finding away to bring about his plan. He wanted a memorial; he had little interest in a work of art.

The people that planned the memorial were the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, hired professionals, to run the design competition. They specified in advance many features for which Lin’s work is admired.

They envisioned a mostly horizontal, contemplative work that did

Sometimes men just want to get into a political fight to be the center of attention and get their names in the paper; a personal political agenda.

Another problem was a translation problem. The arts professionals knew how to read Lin’s drawing; they would have recognized the form, the setting, and the materials as standard elements in land-art pieces. The veterans, on the other hand, didn’t know about the land-art aesthetics. The veterans read Lin’s pastel rendering as, at best, a weird shape.

Pat Buchanan, political commentator, declared that the distinguished art and architectural jurors on the selection committee were “a pack of communists and anti-war lefties.” Buchanan and Representative Henry Hyde, Republican from Illinois, led a campaign featuring letters which claimed that one of the jurors on the selection committee was a communist and four of the jurors had been anti-war protesters. Ross Perot had given a hundred and sixty thousand dollars to fund the design competition, and he became one of the leaders of protest along with Buchanan and Hyde.

“The first thing I thought of,” stated veteran Jan Scruggs, “was that it looked like a bat.” Scruggs seemed to accept Lin’s design until the controversy began.4

To the veterans, I can understand that when they looked at Lin all they saw was an Oriental face that looked like the enemy they had been overseas fighting. To Americans the Oriental face has no distinction between Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Taiwanese.

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