How veterans are remembered at the NYC Vietnam Veterans Plaza

Plaques with the names of U.S. military personel who died as a result of their service in Vietnam 1957-1975.

A glass wall at the NYC Vietnam Veterans Plaza is engraved with quotations from letters written to and from soldiers during the war. It also features quotations from relevant public figures from the time.

According to Casey, public memory is constructed through a melding of identities, including national, regional, social, and personal, all of which exist simultaneously in the physical places where events or people are memorialized. He then goes onto argue that, because of the intersection of these identities, “one need not have known the action in order to commemorate it” (34). 

When I visited the Vietnam Veterans memorial, the experience felt strangely personal. I didn’t recognize any of the names engraved on the marble plaques, the quotations from letters written to and from soldiers inscribed on the glass wall didn’t mean much to me—and yet I felt a sense of empathy, a connection to them. In this way, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York City weaves together collective and individual memory.

At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York City, 12 marble plaques are engraved with the names of New York City Vietnam soldiers who lost their lives, went missing in action, or were taken prisoners of war; there is also a glass wall inscribed with quotations, many of which were sourced from letters written to and from soldiers. This is a form of what Casey calls discursive public discussion, which he says can help perpetuate a certain kind of public memory. Although, in this case, the discussion is not verbal, the names and excerpts from letters create a discourse that humanizes Vietnam War veterans. According to Arendt (as cited in Casey), this is an important part of the revising of a public memory: “Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or in intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind of reality which … they never could have had before” (34). 

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in New York City demonstrates how memorials can be designed to perpetuate a certain kind of memory. Casey says public memory is mutable and capable of transformation through memorialization—because public memory is carried within us on social and personal levels, it is “transmitted and received [differently] with important changes over time” (38).  Because of their sad homecoming following the war and the way they were treated by American society, a need for a space to honor their service is not only necessary but deserved. The memorial in New York City brings these forgotten victims back into the memory of the war and provides a space for Americans to honor their service, even if they don’t agree with the war itself.