Maya Lin

I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.

I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.

The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.

It was a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. We’re reaching a time that we’ll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level.

When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don’t pry into other people’s business.