black and gray concrete wall — Photo by Ian Hutchinson on Unsplash

In August 1968, the 18-year-old son of a cab driver and a waitress enlisted in the United States Army. He later remarked that he’d given almost no thought to the fact that he was joining the military at the height of the Vietnam War.

By April of the following year, however, he was serving in combat as a mortarman with the 199th Light Infantry Brigade, northeast of Saigon:

May 1969 — A rocket-propelled grenade hit him in the back, the right arm, and both legs. He spent three months in the hospital and then went back to his unit.
November 1969 — He was decorated for valor after running out under fire to retrieve a weapon.
January 1970 — He was about 200 yards away when a load of mortar rounds went off accidentally while it was being unloaded from a truck. Thirteen men from his battalion were killed.

Jan Scruggs came home that spring to Maryland, to find a country that didn’t care for his service. Women wouldn’t go out with him once they found out he’d been in Vietnam. He took a job as a security guard while enrolled at a community college, then quit both, bought a motorcycle, and spent most of a year riding around the country and drinking.

Eventually he came back to the Washington area and enrolled at American University. He met a woman named Becky Fishman at a 7-Eleven late one night, married her in 1974, and earned a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in psychology, studying what was then a fairly new diagnosis: post-traumatic stress disorder. He testified about it before Congress.

In March 1979, Jan and Becky went to see the movie The Deer Hunter, about three friends from a Pennsylvania steel town whose lives are wrecked by the Vietnam War. Jan stayed up drinking afterward.

The next morning, he told Becky he had decided there ought to be a memorial in Washington with the name of every American who died in Vietnam.

“I wondered if he’d gone off the deep end,” she said later. She was also worried he’d spend their savings on it.

Sure enough, Jan quit his job and worked on the project 11 hours a day, six days a week, while Becky’s salary paid the bills. But the idea went nowhere at first. By July 4, Jan and a small group of early supporters had raised a total of $144.50.

Roger Mudd closed the CBS Evening News by noting how unsuccessful the group had been, and late-night comedians picked up the joke. Among the millions who saw the mockery, however, was John “Jack” Wheeler III, a West Point graduate who had been a staff officer at Army HQ in Vietnam.

“Jan had risked one of the most horrible things you can do in America, which is appear foolish,” Wheeler later said. “I called him and said, ‘You can do this.’”

The growing group found support from two U.S. senators, and donations started coming in, mostly $5 and $10 at a time. From there, H. Ross Perot got deeply involved.

The fund eventually raised $8.4 million, none of it from the government, and in July 1980, President Carter signed a law setting aside two acres for the memorial.

Now came the real controversy: The fund held an open national design competition and drew 1,421 entries. On May 1, 1981, the jury unanimously picked Entry No. 1,026, which turned out to be the work of Maya Lin, a 21-year-old Yale senior who had designed it for a class.

Her professor, who also entered the competition and lost, had given her a B-plus. Her design called for two long walls of polished black granite set into the ground in a V, with the names listed in the order the men died.

Tom Carhart, a decorated veteran who had entered the competition himself and became one of the leaders of the opposition, called it “a black gash of shame.”

Scruggs said the criticism sometimes left him depressed. When it did, he thought about the men from his unit and read the letters veterans and their families sent to the fund.

The memorial was dedicated 44 years ago this week, on Saturday, November 13, 1982. More than 15,000 people, most of them Vietnam veterans, marched down Constitution Avenue, some in old uniforms that had spent years in storage.

In the weeks that followed, park officials found people at the wall at 2 a.m., using matches and flashlights to look for names. The wall has more than 58,000 names today, and millions of people visit it every year.

“It was three years of work,” Jan Scruggs once recalled. “Day after day, night after night, that’s all I did. It was part of my healing process, but the purpose was to help heal the wounds of the nation and my fellow veterans and to give them the recognition they’d never had.”

7 other moments from history this week

Sunday, November 8: “With one fell swoop the economic barrier of color was broken down.” — Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, on the general strike that began in New Orleans on this day in 1892. About 25,000 Black and white workers walked off the job together despite employers’ efforts to split them by race, and within days they won a 10-hour workday and overtime pay.
Monday, November 9: “The mere fact that we transplanted an eye is a huge step forward.” — Dr. Eduardo Rodriguez, who led the NYU Langone team that announced the world’s first whole-eye transplant on this day in 2023. The patient, Aaron James, an Arkansas military veteran and lineman injured by a 7,200-volt shock, received a donor’s entire left eye and part of a face in a 21-hour operation that May.
Tuesday, November 10: “Now what belongs together will grow together.” — Willy Brandt, former West German chancellor and mayor of West Berlin when the wall went up in 1961, on this day in 1989, the day after the border opened.
Wednesday, November 11: “I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars.” — British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, announcing the armistice to the House of Commons on this day in 1918.
Thursday, November 12: “A web of nodes in which the user can browse at will.” — Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau, describing hypertext in “WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project,” which they sent to colleagues at CERN on this day in 1990.
Friday, November 13: “Indeed, yes, we found water.” — Anthony Colaprete, principal investigator for NASA’s LCROSS mission, announcing on this day in 2009 that the agency had confirmed water on the Moon. A month earlier, NASA had crashed a spent rocket stage into a permanently shadowed crater near the lunar south pole, and the debris plume contained roughly 25 gallons of water in the portion the instruments could see.
Saturday, November 14: “Since I wasn’t told, I really thought I was in the midst of Mardi Gras.” — Ruby Bridges, recalling the crowds outside William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, which she integrated at age 6 on this day in 1960. Four federal marshals escorted her inside, and she spent the whole first day in the principal’s office.

Understandably

‘It was three years of work ...’