Conference turris::womannotes-v3

    Does anybody know how many American women were killed in Vietnam?
    
    Lorna
    

    please post the 800 number when you can....
    thanz
    

    	
    
    		The number to pledge is:
    
    		  1-800-395-8800
    
    		This starts at 8 a.m. friday
    
    
    		Also, I do not know how many women were killed
    		in Vietnam, but there were 1/4 million women that	
    		served in Vietnam, not all military thou. This 
    		includes Red-cross, USO and more.
    
    

I am an occasional reader of this notesfile and have contributed little.
I learned the motion to add a female soldier to the Vietnam War Memorial
a while ago, and I must say that I am against the motion.  I want to make
one point clear, and that is I am not against honoring female soldiers who
served in Vietnam.  Rather, it is about the Memorial itself.

The Memorial was created by Maya Yin Lin; and from the very beginning, she
was against adding the three soldiers across the wall for artistic reasons.
She has also come out opposing the motion of adding another soldier across
the wall.  She calls such act "defamation of national monuments".

I visited D.C. three times during the last six years, and three times I
went to the wall.  Each time I understood more and more why those three
statutes do not belong there.  It partially destroys the aesthetic purity
of the Memorial.  As an Asian myself, I am keenly aware of the deep
spiritual and almost meditative atmosphere the wall projects.  If you have
been there, you will understand why everything is so calm.  The
statutes only serve to interfere with the atmosphere.

Of course, artistic value is subjective, and my judgment may not be
valid from other's perspective, but I am here to make the best case I 
can to convince you to take my point of view.  Since it is 
subjective, I am not here to make a rational argument, but to make 
an emotional appeal with a short essay I wrote after my third visit.  
It was an effort on my part to capture (of what little that could
be captured in words with my humble pen and inadequate training in English) 
what the wall means, and hope you see why I feel the statutes are out of place.

Eugene

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			The Roses on the Wall



			Copyright by Eugene Z. Xia



	     Standing before the Vietnam War Memorial, I was filled 
	with an overwhelming sense of bewilderment.  After all,  the 
	war was over in the 70's when I was in China and not yet 10 
	years old.  Yet there the wall stood inviting, seducing and 
	drawing me into it.  For the entire afternoon, I wandered 
	from one end of the wall to the other then over and above 
	while the mid-afternoon sun slowly journeyed to the west, 
	turned deep yellow and gradually slided into the wall 
	temporarily masking a few names carved on it.  It was a 
	frightening experience for I stayed yet not knowing why.  
	It was as if a cold mysterious hand touched a previously 
	unreachable part of my soul, twisted it towards an unknown
	direction for an unknown purpose.  Could it be that the 
	creator of the wall was of Chinese heritage and somehow she 
	ingrained the essence of the her Chinese soul into the wall?  
	Or did the dark reflection of the withering flowers remind me 
	of the vulnerability of my youth?  Or was it the premature 
	setting of the sun into the wall that mirrored my own
	mortality?  

	     Still, one couldn't ignore the towering dominance of 
	the Washington Monument looming over the shallow rectangular 
	pond covered with thing ice, and the the heavy and almost 
	menacing shadow of the Lincoln Memorial a few hundred yards 
	away.  I wonder what they were thinking when they took the 
	elevator to the top of the monument 600 feet above the ground.
	Did they come to pay tribute and mourn the death of their 
	great leader who died over a century ago?  What of the 
	veterans dressed up to salute the marines who raised the 
	flag in Iwojima?  The simple truth is that few memorials 
	were ever built for the dead.  

	     My vision became less clear as the near twilight sun 
	gradually lost its vitality and finally sunk beneath the 
	foundation of the wall.  There in the mist of a rising fog 
	were a few veterans in their worn out military fatigues 
	still stained with the dirt and dead leaves from the remote 
	jungles of Vietnam, a few fingerprints scattered over the 
	otherwise dark but shiny surface of the wall where the dead 
	soldiers names were thinly engraved, and some thick dark 
	clouds hovering over in the strong wind.  The moisture slowly 
	gathered to form small dewdrops, and the flower on the ground 
	trembled.

	     When Jim and his roaring Firebird finally arrived, the 
	drizzle had turned into a pouring rain tasting slightly salty.  
	The black marble and the flowers reflected by it instantly 
	receded into the distant background of the Lincoln Memorial.  
	Jim apologized profusely for not coming earlier before the 
	rain started.  Then in a bewildered tone, he asked: "But why 
	didn't you go and wait in the Lincoln Memorial?"  "Oh, that is 
	OK.  No problem.", I uttered, and repeated a few times blankly.  
	The only thing resonating in my mind were the sound of the 
	heavy rain beating on the fragile flowers by the wall and the 
	hollow voice of T.S. Eliot:

	"Ash on an old man's sleeve   
	 Is all the ash the burnt roses leave."

I agree with Eugene about the "Heroic Figures" added to the Vietnam Memorial in
Washington.  I hope that some day they are moved to another site.  In a way
they are symbolic of the conflict.  Americans could not agree on the war and
when it was over they couldn't agree on the monument.

My first visit to "The Wall" was on an early evening in October.  My friend and
I had justs finished a day of business in Washington and planned to see the
monument.  By the time we got there it was totally dark and there were no
lights.   We viewed the monument by the light of a cigarette lighter.  There
were at least 10 other people there at the same time.  What a contract to the
Lincoln, Washington and Jefferson Memorials.

My second visit was during the day and I was impressed with the interaction
between the visitors and monument.  I understand the monument has become a
major Washington attraction.  

re .4,

     I realized that I have attributed something to Maya Lin; something she
did not said.  She did not use the word "defamation"--that word implies 
malicious intent, and Ms. Lin has the highest regard for the men and women
served in Vietnam--she created the memorial for the veterans.  It is also
true, however, that she did object to the addition of the statutes in the
strongest terms.

re .5,

     No, Americans still cannot agree on the war and the monument.  There is
only one exception--we all agree that America lost the war.  War rarely 
accomplishes anything, and this is especially poignant to the side that lost.
50,000 Americans dead and many more wounded and hundreds and thousands
of Vietnamese lost, wounded and killed.  All this sacrifice served only to
delay the inevitable by 12 years.

     War also creates extreme conditions and often inspires
generations of the greatest and most creative artists.  This tradition
goes back as early as Homer and his Iliad.  In the modern era, World War 
I gave birth to "All Quiet on the Western Front" and nurtured poets and 
novelists like Virginia Wolf, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.  During the darkest
days of World War II, when England was under the threat of invasion,
Eliot set out to write his "Four Quartet".  Under the London sky filled 
with German diving bombers screaming horror and delivering death and 
destruction, amid the fire and dust and buildings crumbled to the foundations, 
came the religious inspiration of the purest kind:

        The dove descending breaks the air
        With flame of incandescent terror
        Of which the tongues declare
        The one discharge from sin and error.
        The only hope, or else despair
           Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--
           To be redeemed from fire by fire.

     War War II did not give much inspiration to the American artists
because we won.  During and after the war, Hollywood produced roll after
roll of films of John Wayne with his cowboy hat and cowboy boots shooting
his way to Berlin and Tokyo.  Even today, the TV cables are filled with
movies of that era.  Meanwhile, the Germans made "Das Boat".  The North
won the American Civil War, but William Faulkner emerged from the South.

     We lost the Vietnam War, and for years the veterans fought hard for
the recognition of their sacrifices.  They have searched desperately for 
the meaning of their sacrifices, but couldn't find any--for there has
never been any.  Finally, something did come, something original, something
magnificent, something with a universal appeal.  The irony is many of them
are now upset about it.

     From the Vietnam War also came movies like "Platoon", "Killing Field"
and "Apocalypse Now", although the last one is not really about Vietnam.

Eugene