For three days we sit in our rec room and drink all of the beer and watch all of these damn movies, and we yell Semper fi and we head-butt and beat the crap out of each other and we get off on the various visions of carnage and violence and deceit, the raping and killing and pillaging. We concentrate on the Vietnam films because it’s the most recent war, and the successes and failures of that war helped write our training manuals.8
These soldiers love war, or at least the idea of war, which is no surprise, as war is their calling. In order to love war and love their own side while hating the other side, they remember their own.
The black wall does not engage in such an obvious ethics of memory, although political interests have used it for that purpose. If the black wall engaged directly in this call to remember only one’s own, especially in the virile ways that the Marines enjoy, it would not be a very compelling memorial. Many memorials are more transparent and upright about celebrating wars, masculinity, heroism, and sacrifice, and few elicit the depth of attachment from visitors that the dark wall does. The wall’s power does not come from its complete commitment to war and soldiers but from its deep ambivalence about war and soldiers, who do not even appear personified as figures, faces, or bodies. The black wall is both mirror and barrier, and this is what shapes and creates the ambivalence. As a mirror, the wall shows the figures, faces, or bodies of its visitors over the names of the dead, while as a barrier, the wall separates the living from the dead. In this way, the wall foregrounds feelings of recognition and alienation, of intimacy and distance, of the relationship between the living and the dead. Both mirror and barrier, both a place that evokes sight and is a site, the wall captures how the dead belong to the living as their own but are also irrevocably other. And yet that otherness — the mystery and terror of death that is embodied by the dead — is one that will inevitably be shared by the living, who sense the otherness of their own inevitable mortality calling to them from behind that black wall. What makes the black wall powerful is its embodiment of remembering oneself as well as its evocation of otherness.
Maya Lin’s reflections on the black wall’s design suggest that the world around her shaped her aesthetic and the memory of being both oneself and other. “To some, I am not really an American,” she writes with emphasis, reflecting on her childhood in the American Midwest and the controversy around her selection. Lin was a college student when she won the competition for the design of the memorial, and some viewed her selection as an affront. They could not understand how a woman, a youth, and a Chinese American could design a memorial for men, for soldiers, and for Americans. The “feeling of being other … has profoundly shaped my way of looking at the world — as if from a distance — a third-person observer.”9 Compare this late-twentieth-century experience with W. E. B. DuBois’s claims in The Souls of Black Folk, from 1903:
the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.10
Many minorities besides African Americans also claim double consciousness for themselves. They experience this distinction between America’s dominant self — the white self — and its darker others not only in a worldly way, as part of a group cast as other, but also in a personal way. “One feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”11 The black wall emerges from this divided way of seeing the world for Maya Lin, but what is also powerful about double consciousness is its universal quality, one that paradoxically arises from the particularity of black experience.
While minorities may experience double consciousness regularly, even daily, the power of the black wall is that it conveys that sense to individuals who are not used to experiencing it, and then reconciles that duality. These visitors experience the double consciousness of seeing themselves and being seen by the dead, the ghosts of the soldiers who together comprise, in the words of classicist James Tatum, “an insurrection of the dead.”12 Perhaps what the visitor who touches the black wall and is touched by it feels is the sense that she, too, is a minority, regardless of race or culture. In this instance, one’s minority identity is to belong to the living, outnumbered by the hosts of the dead. But this moment of double consciousness is reconciled for many, if not all, by the commemorative, nationalist calls that have been delivered by presidents, soldiers, and veterans around the black wall. These nationalist calls allow visitors to mourn with and for the dead, and to submerge the potentially troubling manifestation of double consciousness into the singular consciousness of national identity, of the American, the patriot, the good citizen.
Through its design and its effect, the black wall reveals the porousness between the two ethical models of remembering one’s own and remembering others. In the crudest version of the ethics of remembering one’s own, we draw a clear line between us and them, the good and the bad, the here and the there, the living and the dead (for we will smite our enemies if they are not already dead). Such an ethics motivates people to fight wars against their enemies and draws from those “thick” relations of family, friends, and countrymen described by philosopher Avishai Margalit. Thick relations are apparently natural to Margalit, but in actuality these bonds must be made by us with people who are originally other to us. We solidify these bonds over time with the stories we tell ourselves about our love for our family, friends, and countrymen. The idea of family obscures this process of thickening because many people think of family bonds as natural, even though much evidence of alienation within family exists, from murder, abuse, violence and pedophilia to apathy, rivalry, and hatred. The biblical story of Cain and Abel tells us that it is as natural to kill those close to us as it is to love them, while Freud’s psychoanalytic story tells us that the gap between self and other begins within oneself soon after birth, at the mirror stage which Maya Lin’s reflective wall invokes. But despite this alienation from others and ourselves, the lucky among us discover that our family loves us, and we learn to love them in return. Gradually we extend the circle of the near and dear to those strangers who become our friends and neighbors, then our countrymen, until some of us learn the ultimate lesson, as Bao Ninh writes of Kien: “He would understand true sacrifice: friends who would die to save others.”13 But under the sway of patriotism and nationalism, we forget that we have learned how to remember these others, that our love is acquired rather than spontaneous.
The black wall and the controversies around it both illuminate and obscure how remembering one’s own and remembering others are always at play together. For many Americans, the black wall tells the story of how some among us were cast out, how they eventually came back, and how we welcomed them, at last restoring friendship, familial bonds, patriotic feelings, and good relations between citizen and soldier. Some of the controversies around the black wall arise, however, because some visitors feel that the black wall is not inclusive or reflective enough. This is the paradox of the ethics of remembering one’s own, that to be successful, it must convince the right others that they are recognized or should want to be recognized. This is also the problem of the mirror and the sight of memory: does the mirror reflect us, or the image of us that we would like to see? Does the mirror make us feel whole or does it make us feel like an other? Some veterans and their supporters did not see themselves reflected in the black wall’s memory; feeling themselves to be excluded, to be other, they demanded better representation. The visitor to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial thus encounters not only the black wall but also two sculptures nearby, one featuring black, white, and Latino GIs, weary and contemplative as they gaze at the wall, the other with three nurses tending to a wounded soldier. These sculpted soldiers and nurses are heroic, human, and embodied, commissioned by the memorial’s authorities to address the concern that the wall, without bodies and faces, could neither represent nor recognize the veterans. These sculptures also exist, then, to remember the nation’s own.