The Wall. Two hundred and forty-six feet of polished black granite on each side, meeting at a vertex ten feet and three inches above your head. Fifty-eight thousand names. And the whole thing started with a movie ticket.
Jan Scruggs was a kid from Bowie, Maryland, who volunteered for the draft. In nineteen sixty-nine a grenade attack left him wounded in the back, arm, and both legs. They patched him up and sent him back — and months later he watched a dozen of his friends burn when an ammunition truck exploded.
He came home shattered. Then in nineteen seventy-nine he walked into a movie theater and saw The Deer Hunter, and every memory he'd buried came flooding back. That night, in a haze of flashbacks, the idea hit him. A national memorial. With every single name.
He announced the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund on May twenty-eighth — the anniversary of the day he'd been wounded. He started with two thousand eight hundred dollars of his own money. A few months later, a reporter call
ed for an update. Scruggs had to tell him the total was a hundred and forty-four dollars and fifty cents.
He raised eight point four million. All private. Not one dollar of federal money. And they built this memorial in thirty-six months from concept to dedication — the fastest any national memorial had ever been completed.
Then there's Maya Lin. She was a twenty-one-year-old senior at Yale when
