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.
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.
Designer and sculptor Maya Ying Lin (64)
The Chinese/American was born in Athens, Ohio.
Maya Lin was still an undergraduate at Yale University
when she beat out more than 1,400 competitors in a
competition to design the memorial.
