Why Are There So Many Copies of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall?

Some communities have not been willing to settle for a traveling replica, so they have built permanent imitations instead. Visitors to the Healing Fields of Honor in Naperville, Illinois, described its new Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall—a full-scale copy of Lin’s original design—as “hallowed ground” when it opened in November. Planners behind a Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall replica for southern Oregon can’t quite agree on a location in or around Central Point. There are standing replica memorials in Pensacola, Florida;Wildwood, New Jersey; and other cities.

Arguably, there’s something about Lin’s design that gets lost in replication. Many of the planned and temporary memorials across the nation can’t boast the same acreage as the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, for starters. None of them carries with it the same grandeur as the National Mall, where, around so much gleaming white commemorative marble, Lin’s Vietnam tribute reads like a scar across the landscape. A replica just can’t convey the audacity of the original.

All the imitations around the country speak to the clarity of Lin’s original design concept. Her visual vocabulary was stark. It’s easy to understand what you’re supposed to do at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which isn’t always true of other memorials on the Mall, older and newer ones alike. So it’s easy to see why communities would want to take part of that home.

But the memorial’s popularity perhaps owes to its dilution over time as well. No one would think today to describe the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as “Orwellian glop” or “a black gash of shame”—as the critics put it shortly after the design debuted. Polished black granite inscribed with the names of the dead is still a stark visual, but less so with every iteration. The wall doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to my dad. Surely for Millennials, the idea of the Vietnam War is even foggier and more remote.

That’s how history goes. Maybe touring Vietnam memorials is one way to preserve the national memory of a shameful war. And of course, for a veteran or family member who never has the luxury of visiting the nation’s capital, the difference in the value proposition between the replica and the original may be marginal. More replicas mean more access to the function of memorialization—in this case, tracing a name or leaving an offering of a pack of smokes.

That function of memorialization is personal for walls in a way that’s hardly ever true of statues or obelisks, at least today. Whether that function can be described as healing or nostalgia, remembrance or performed grief, is up for judgment. One element that a national memorial provides that a local memorial cannot, though, is clarity—considered, debated, adjudicated, and designed. That’s different from access. There could be Vietnam Veterans Memorial walls in every city in the nation; they wouldn’t add up to the one.