NPR ran an interesting hour-long piece on the Vietnam veterans memorial wall in D.C. today. If you have an hour and the interest, I recommend giving it a listen (click on the “Stream” button in upper left; keep a hanky or a box of tissues at hand).

American Icons: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

The Wall is in the news again, thanks to Obama’s government shutdown. In order to ‘save money,” the government has ordered the Wall closed to visitors and is spending money to pay police to evict people who walk up to the Wall, which is  on open public ground. This is not only stupid, it’s insultingly stupid and a transparently obvious ham-handed political stunt. The claims being made about the National Park Service closing down facilities that normally require little to no actual staff is that without staff on hand, visitors could get injured and need rescue that won’t come, or vandals could sneak in and damage things. Both of these arguments are silly in this case. In the case of the first argument, the Wall is located in an open, public place… not a difficult place for an ambulance to get to. And the second argument, that vandals could cause a ruckus… well, if you’ve ever been to The Wall, you know that the Wall has a security system in place far more effective than a few dozen Park Rangers or random police: the veterans themselves. Anyone who pulls out a hammer or a can of spray paint is going to very quickly find himself the subject of intense… ah, “scrutiny,’ shall we say, from a number of guys like these:

A few anecdotes:

In May of 1996, I was packing up to leave the D.C. area. My first real job after graduating with my Aero E degree was at OSC in Virginia; the job lasted all of a month, because the X-34 I got hired to work on got cancelled the week after I got there. My dad came out to help me pack and move to my next job in Colorado. We went to supper at a restaurant in Arlington and noticed a large number of bikers… bikers with Vietnam veteran regalia. Came to find out that the next day was “Rolling Thunder,” when hundreds of thousands of bikers would roll into D.C. to pay respects at the Wall. The original plan had been to leave that day; we put it off one more day in order to see the procession. We went to the Mall early in the morning, several hours before the bikers were to arrive, and made our way to the Wall. If you’ve ever been there you know that approaching it is unlike approaching pretty much anywhere else on Earth… a level of solemnity not readily found. While my dad looked up his friends on the Wall, among a number of other veterans and family members, a group of tourists approached. These tourists, clearly Asian (Japanese? Vietnamese? Korean? Don’t know, doesn’t matter), were unaffected by the force field of sadness that surrounds the Wall, and were joking and laughing and have a good old time. Anywhere else… nobody would care. At the Wall… that was the wrong reaction. A wave of shock and anger passed among those of us close to the Wall. But the problem came to an *extremely* sudden close. I turned around at the sudden silence and found that this group of a half dozen or so college-age happy tourists were instantly silent and solemn… and surrounded by several times their number of very large, very angry, and very silent Hell’s Angels-looking fellers. There were no raised voices, no threats, no acts of violence, not even the expenditure of a single taxpayer dime, and yet a potential issue at the wall was dealt with quickly and efficiently by those who were there.

A few years later, while living and working in Colorado, a good friend and I were having lunch at a pizza joint in Golden. The TV was on over his shoulder; something on screen caught my attention, and the look of shock on my face caught my friends attention. We instantly shouted for the volume to be turned up. What was going on? In Denver there is a really good military aviation museum, “Wings Over The Rockies.” Sitting outside is a B-52. And what the TV was showing was the cockpit of the B-52 a roaring mass of flames. The volume came up in time for us to hear that some jackass had decided to toss Molotov Cocktails into the cockpit in some form of delusional protest about… something. We were both instantly PO’ed, my friend rather more so since he’d served around B-52s during his time in the Jimmy Carter Peace-Time Fly-In Club (aka: the USAF in the late 1970’s).

But our rage turned very suddenly to laughter. The guy who torched the B-52 was shown sitting in a police squad car… beaten and bloody, apparently lacking a few teeth he’d started the day with. Was this due to Park Rangers or police being Johnnie On The Spot and laying a beatdown? No. His capture and apparent fall down a few flights of stairs was courtesy of a veteran who was simply visiting the museum at the time and who took a dim view of arson.

There are some places where a lack of Park Rangers could reasonably argue towards closing the gates. But the Wall? The WWII memorial? Please. These are examples of places that without government authorities still manage to self regulate. If someone has a heart attack at the Wall, there will be dozens to hundreds in the immediate vicinity who *will* render aid. If someone decides to engage in criminality, there are again dozens to hundreds who will leap in to make him stop, and they will do so much faster than any pre-shutdown collection of Park Rangers.

It might be interesting to know how the Wall is doing in a few decades. For Baby Boomers – the generation that served in Nam – the Wall is powerful. For many Gen Xers – the children of Nam vets, who grew up with the stories or the silence, who saw at first hand what the war did to the vets – the Wall is powerful. But how about following generations? The kids of the Gen Xers will only get occasional war stories from Grampa, or reminiscences about long-lost Grampa from Mom or Dad. The impact of the Wall will, probably, fade. Who gets weepy at Spanish American War monuments? Time fades the impact of such things. But perhaps the power of the Wall will last longer due to its unique nature. As mentioned in the NPR piece, it has changed the way people relate to memorials in the US. Before the Wall, people rarely left mementos. after the Wall, piles of photos and teddy bears and notes and such *are* the memorials.