Reflections in the Wall - the Vietnam War Memorial

The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington means different things to different people. This movie explores one perspective. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a national war memorial located in Washington, D.C., that honors members of the U.S. armed forces who had died in service or are unaccounted for during the Vietnam War. Its construction and related issues have been the source of numerous 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 most recognized part of the memorial. The main part of the memorial was completed in 1982 and is located in Constitution Gardens adjacent to the National Mall, just northeast of the Lincoln Memorial. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is maintained by the U.S. National Park Service, and receives around 3 million visitors each year. The Memorial Wall was designed by U.S. architect Maya Lin.

Music is "From Belfast to Boston" by James Taylor

The following is from Judith Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence
"I argue that a national melancholia, understood as disavowed mourning,
follows upon the erasure from public representations of the names, images,
and narratives of those the US has killed. On the other hand, the US's own
losses are consecrated in public obituaries that constitute so many acts of
nation-building. Some lives are grievable, and others are not; the
differential allocation of grievability that decides what kind of subject
is and must be grieved, and which kind of subject must not, operates to
produce and maintain certain exclusionary conceptions of who is normatively
human: what counts as a libable life and a grievable death?"