In Memoriam

EARLY October is probably the nicest time of the year in Washington: not too hot, not too cold, only a shirt needed in the daytime, a pullover in the evening. The leaves on the trees in the US capital’s famed Mall have just started to turn a glorious gold. On the only afternoon that I have off, my steps take me to the Vietnam War Memorial, located on one side of the Abraham Lincoln Memorial. It was not there when I was last in Washington, accompanying Rajiv Gandhi in his press party during his hugely successful 1985 foreign tour. The two memorials are a study in contrast, the Lincoln Memorial a throwback to the grand Roman and Greek classical age, which inspired the early American architects, and the Vietnam War Memorial a modern classic, designed, I believe, by an American-Chinese architect.

It is an upright and long piece of slim, polished black granite, with the names of over 50,000 Americans who died in the Vietnam war etched into it. The monument starts at ground level, rises gradually to just above the head and then tapers down again to ground level. There is a path alongside it for the thousands of visitors who come to see it every day. Many of them relatives of the men who perished in a conflict which still rankles in American minds, largely because it is the only war the US lost in its proud history. Bouquets of flowers lie at the base of the granite structure, left behind by the near and dear ones of those dead. It is a simple, stark, yet intensely moving monument, perhaps because of its simplicity and starkness. I wonder what the Vietnamese have put up for the half-a-million of their countrymen who also died in that bloody war, 10 times more than the Americans.