Monuments and Memory: Appropriating the Westminster Vietnam War Memorial

Monuments and memorials have specific purposes and audiences for which and for whom they are built. It is crucial for any visitor to have a clear idea of the purpose for which a particular memorial was erected. Without an understanding of that purpose, the visitor can develop unrealistic expectations or become overly critical, asking the monument to do something for which it was not created. However, it is also true that individuals and groups appropriate monuments for their own personal and private activities of commemoration and memory. Monuments are thus utilized in the maintenance of relationships in imagined communities across living and non-living divides through acts of remembering. Rising out of ethnographic work, I analyze the Westminster memorial within this context of the public absence of representations of the South Vietnamese in monumental commemoration. I argue that the memorial acts as a prosthetic device (Landsberg, 2004) that re-writes United States and Vietnamese war historiography so that it no longer excludes South Vietnamese fallen soldiers, lost ‘boat people,’ and post-war refugee survivors. The memorial provides a physical space for the voicing of long silent discourses associated with, but not limited to, the Vietnam War. This work incorporates six sections including methodology, a descriptive section, the monument as a negotiated prosthetic ‘device,’ memory and appropriations of monumental space, remembering and forgetting in monumentalism, and notions of debt and tribute in reference to commemoration and memorialization. Monuments have specific purposes, however, these purposes are often debated and negotiated with the final product becoming an acceptable compromise. The notion of the prosthetic device involves the idea that monuments invoke the memories of things and people lost. This monument provides a space and place for the living to interact within a milieu of loss – the loss of a nation, the loss of presence and the silencing of voice. In this memorial space, there is the perceived need for the living to pay tribute due to feelings of debt owed to those who gave their lives, and for whom the monument was built