How many signatures are on the Vietnam War Memorial?”
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a national war memorial in Washington, D.C. It honors members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War and who died in service or are still unaccounted for. Its construction and related issues have been the source of controversies, some of which have resulted in additions to the memorial complex. The memorial currently consists of three separate parts: the Three Soldiers statue, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which is the best-known part of the memorial. The memorial was inspired by Jan Scruggs, an infantryman who served in Vietnam with the U.S. Army’s 199th Light Infantry Brigade. In March 1979, he saw The Deer Hunter, which reminded him “of the people he’d seen suffer and die in Vietnam”. That night he decided to build a memorial with the names of everyone killed in the Vietnam War.[1] The main part of the memorial, which was completed in 1982, is in Constitution Gardens adjacent to the National Mal
thewall-usa.com has more information: The latest name added in 2009, brought the number of names on the black granite Wall to 58,261. HOW WERE THE NAMES CARVED? The names were NOT carved by hand, but by a computerized typesetting process (by Datalantic, Incorporated, Atlanta, Georgia) called photo stencil gritblasting, developed by Larry Century, specifically for the Memorial, in Memphis, Tennessee. HOW WAS THE PROCESS DONE? The process is of a digitized typeface called Optima. It involves a film negative at one-third in size from which an enlargement is made, a film positive (a stencil) at full size. The next step is coating the granite, which has been polished, with a photo sensitive emulsion, and the image is then transferred from the enlargement to the stone in a process very similar to silkscreening. When this step has been completed, the stone within the area of the letters is exposed and the remaining surface is protected by th
