The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a two-acre national memorial in Washington DC honoring the United States armed forces servicemembers who served in the Vietnam War of 1955-1975. The Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund advocated for the creation of a memorial in 1979, four years after the fall of Saigon, and the memorial was built on the site of the World War I Munitions Building, which had been demolished in 1970. In 1981, Yale undergraduate Maya Lin designed a black memorial wall which would feature the names of 58,276 servicemembers who were killed, missing, or died of war-related causes from 1959 to 1975. The design was initially criticized by conservatives such as Ross Perot, Jim Webb, and James G. Watt for its "nihilistic" design, which critics claimed evoked "shame and sorrow." A bronze statue honoring the white, Black, and Latino soldiers who served in the war was established in 1984 to appease those who desired a realist memorial to the Vietnam War, marking the first representation of an African-American on the National Mall. In 1993, the Vietnam Women's Memorial was installed to commemorate the women who served as nurses, air traffic controllers, and in other support roles during the war; however, the memorial was criticized for its inaccuracy in portraying nurses as giving medical care in the field, when they were relegated to military hospitals behind the front lines. Nevertheless, the Vietnam Memorial has since become an iconic feature of Washington DC, receiving three million visitors each year.
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