The Wall, the Screen, and the Image: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial

With the Vietnam War, discourses of public commemoration have become inextricably tied to the question of how war is brought to a closure in American society. How, for instance, does a society commemorate a war for which the central narrative is one of division and dissent, a war whose history is highly contested and still in the process of being made? As Peter Ehrenhaus writes, "The tradition of U.S. public discourse in the wake of war is founded upon the premises of clarity of purpose and success; when such presumptions must account for division, equivocation, and failure, and when losing is among the greatest of sins, commemoration seems somehow inappropriate."' Yet the Vietnam War-with its division and confusion, its lack of a singular, historical narrative defining clear-cut purpose and outcome-has led to a very different form of commemoration. I would like to focus this discussion of public remembrance on the notion of a screen, in its many meanings. A screen can be a surface that is projected upon; it is also an object that hides something from view, that shelters or protects. It can be a surface, or even a body-in military language a screen is a "body of men" who are used to cover the movements of an army. Freud's screen memory functions to hide highly emotional material, which the screen memory conceals while offering itself as a substitute. The kinds of screens that converge in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., both shield and project: the black walls of the memorial act as screens for innumerable projections of memory and history-of the United States' participation in the Vietnam War and of the experience of the Vietnam veterans since the war-while they screen out the narrative of defeat in preparing for wars to come. Seeing the memorial as a screen also evokes the screens on which the war was and continues to be experienced-cin-