On this day in history, November 13, the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, DC was first dedicated. The dedication was the culmination of a week-long national commemoration of the men and women who fought the war.The memorial was designed by Maya Lin, a Yale University architecture student at the time, who won a national competition to create a design for the national memorial. Lin was born in Ohio in 1959, the year the U.S. entered the war, and is the daughter of Chinese immigrants.
The memorial consists of a simple, V-shaped design made of black granite. On the granite is inscribed the names of the 57,939 Americans who paid the ultimate price to serve their nation in the Vietnam War (1959-1975).
