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8 “A Confrontation between Faiths” The Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial ✯ In the decade between the completion of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in 1982 and its tenth anniversary, scores of Vietnam veterans memorials were constructed around the country.1 Studying them can provide useful confirmation and amplification of the debates surrounding the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in the nation’s capital, distinguishing idiosyncratic, accidental matters from recurrent themes. This chapter focuses on the Kentucky Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose leading advocate, the chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program (VVLP) in Louisville, wanted the memorial to make a clear political statement justifying the war. The Vietnam War, he believed, was a confrontation between faiths, in which the God-fearing and freedom-loving democracies opposed Communist oppression, and that was how he demanded it should be remembered. Because he insisted that the Kentucky memorial make, rather than avoid making, a political statement, the debate about the Kentucky memorial’s design provides a counterpoint to the arguments about the memorial in Washington. A survey of the other memorial efforts initiated after the 1982 dedication of the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial establishes that planning for the Kentucky memorial was initially quite distinctive in challenging the prevalent discourse of “healing” and the ethos of “separating the warrior from the war.” Ultimately, though, it fell into a measure of conformity with these predominant approaches to commemorating the Vietnam War. Although state and local memorials did not undergo as much public scrutiny as the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial did and did not bear the burden of having to create a durable statement about the war for the nation as a whole, they nevertheless faced some of the same pressures: every time a group planned a memorial they had to consider how best to memorialize the war and those who fought in it; they anticipated responses from a public with diverse views of the war; and, even if they wished to express an ideological message, they had to consider and perhaps 231 232 “A Confrontation between Faiths” even embrace a diversity of opinion. These conditions were the same as those faced by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF). In one important sense, though, the people who planned state and local memorials after 1982 operated in a completely different world, one that had been transformed by the creation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial itself. The controversy attached to the national memorial alerted them to the likelihood of intense ideological and aesthetic debates, so that they were forewarned to a degree that the officers of the VVMF were not. The national memorial’s successful reception by the public and commentators after its unveiling also gave local groups an aesthetic model to follow. It would no longer be possible to dismiss ordinary Americans’ receptivity to abstract or modern designs after they responded positively to Maya Lin’s wall—indeed, the public were more responsive to the wall than they had been to any other public monument in living memory. The “compromise” that added a bronze statue to the wall also proved to be influential on later commemorative plans—but in state and local memorials, planners tried to integrate figurative and abstract or architectural components from the start, rather than trying to insert statues into existing designs, as in Washington, DC. The memorial in the nation’s capital also provided examples of what to avoid: having seen the design jury castigated for not including Vietnam veterans in its number , the planners of memorials around the country sought to insulate their juries (and therefore the commemorative efforts) from this sort of criticism. Vietnam veterans chose the design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Cincinnati and, as their leader said, it “wasn’t chosen by a high-powered group of art people; it was chosen by the veterans themselves.”2 Stan Horton, the Houston VVLP program director, said that the committee selecting the winning designs for Vietnam veterans memorials in Harris County, Texas, would include members of area veterans’ groups and Gold Star Mothers.3 The Minnesota Vietnam Veterans Memorial organization included two Vietnam veterans (one of them the sculptor Rodger Brodin) on a ten-person design jury chaired by a landscape architect.4 In Arkansas, the office of the secretary of state and a committee of Vietnam veterans oversaw the selection of a design for a local memorial, and the designs considered for the Kansas City [Missouri] Vietnam Veterans Memorial were all produced by Vietnam veterans.5 Veterans in the New...

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