Vietnam vet Jan Scruggs had initiated the project in 1979 after he saw the movie Deer Hunter . Some opponents said the wall should be white, not black. Soldiers who'd been there understood. Lin's very distance from the flailing passions of the war had given her means for seeing that names had to be the memorial's focus. She gave the names of those soldiers back to a country that'd tried to forget them.
Fine monuments do that.
Nineteenth-century Parisians cursed the Eiffel Tower as it rose into the sky. But Eiffel's eerie design eventually made its point. As the 1982 dedication of the Memorial neared, the same thing happened. When people see the actual wall they do strange things. They bring ceremony to it.