Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who
served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
was dedicated in Washington, D.C. after a march to its site
by thousands of veterans of the conflict

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The long-awaited memorial was a simple V-shaped black-
granite wall inscribed with the names of the 57,939
Americans who died in the conflict, arranged in order
of death, not rank, as was common in other memorials.

The designer of the memorial was Maya Lin, a Yale
University architecture student who entered a
nationwide competition to  create a design for
the monument. Lin, born in Ohio in 1959, the
daughter of Chinese immigrants.        


        
        
        
       
       

Bob Doubek, project director, and Maya Lin, designer of the 
Memorial.

Exactly three years after the end of World War I, the Tomb
of the Unknown Soldier is dedicated at Arlington Cemetery
in Virginia during an Armistice Day ceremony presided over
by President Warren G. Harding.

Two days before, an unknown American soldier, who had
fallen somewhere on a World War I battlefield, arrived at
the nation’s capital from a military cemetery in France.

As the soldier was lowered to his final resting place, a two-
inch layer of soil brought from France was placed below his
coffin so that he might rest forever atop the earth on which
he died.

George Smith Patton Jr. (11 November 1885 – 21 December 1945)
was a general in the United States Army who commanded the
Seventh Army in the Mediterranean Theater of World War II, then
the Third Army in France and Germany after the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944.

April 9, 1945

During the American Revolution, the Continental Congress
passed a resolution stating that “two Battalions of Marines
be raised” for service as landing forces for the recently
formed Continental Navy.

The resolution, drafted by future U.S. president John Adams
and adopted in Philadelphia on November 10, 1775, created
the Continental Marines and is now observed as the birth
date of the United States Marine Corps.

John Adams (October 30, 1735 – July 4, 1826)