The Vietnam Memorial was inaugurated on 13 November, 1982. The wall was built with $9 million of private funding. The designer was Maya Lin, a student at Yale University. Her design, number 1026, was chosen from a total of 1421 designs submitted. Maya Lin was the daughter of Chinese immigrants, born and raised in Ohio. She later designed the Civil Rights Memorial located in Montgomery, Alabama.
More than 58 thousand names are on the wall. The national archives list 47,434 hostile deaths and 10,786 non-hostile deaths. Two hundred sixty seven names are from Montana. Reliable estimates put the total military and civilian Vietnamese dead at more than three million.
Approximately fifty percent of the people sent to Vietnam saw combat or served near the battle areas. Peak troop strength was achieved on 30 April, 1969, with 543,482 troops. Throughout the length of the war, more than 10,000 women served. Eight of their names are on the wall. Women were nurses or other medical personnel. They were not allowed to carry weapons during the Vietnam war. The Women’s Memorial located near the Vietnam Memorial is controversial as it shows nurses providing medical attention to a soldier in combat. That never happened. Only Army and Navy corpsmen and Air Force medics served in combat. Nurses were restricted to hospital duties and none ever went to battle areas.
The youngest commissioned officer in the Vietnam war was David Christian who completed U.S. Army Officer Candidate School and was commissioned a second lieutenant at the age of eighteen.
Although the start date of the Vietnam War is controversial, the first two official deaths, and the first two names on the Vietnam Memorial, are Maj Buis and Msgt Ovand. They were American advisers killed on 8 July, 1959, as they were watching a movie in the rec center at Bien Hoa when the Vietcong attacked.
The last two official deaths in Vietnam are recorded as 29 April, 1975, when two Marine embassy guards, 19 and 21 years old, were killed in a rocket attack. U.S. combat operations had ceased in 1973.
The U.S. lost 5607 helicopters in Vietnam.
According to the national archives, 86 percent of our Vietnam dead were white.
As of the end of the Vietnam war, 235 medals of honor had been awarded. In later years 33 more were awarded for a total of 268. No Montana soldiers won the medal. Dennis Mack, a Great Falls native, won the Silver Star in 1968 for his actions in combat as a Logistics Convoy Commander.
As of March, 2024, the oldest Vietnam War survivor is Trinh Thikhone at the age of 119. She was born in 1905 and still lives with her family in Vietnam.
Two iconic photos hastened the end of the Vietnam War. The photo of the little nine year old girl running naked and burned from a napalm attack and the photo of the Saigon police chief shooting a prisoner in the head.
Author: Staff
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