A FEW DETAILS At a glance

LEFT AT THE WALL

Visitors who have walked the path and searched for familiar names among the 58,256 etched into the granite have also left tens of thousands of items behind, usually flags, letters or photos. But a few objects stand out, even for Jan Scruggs, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.

An American soldier once left a photo of a North Vietnamese soldier with his daughter. He had shot and killed the soldier while marching through the jungle, then found the photo on the body. Years after the war and with Scruggs’ help, the soldier flew back to Vietnam and met the girl in the photo.

Families have also left a handcrafted Harley Davidson motorcycle, a pair of white prom shoes and a Medal of Honor, left in 1988 to protest the U.S. government’s involvement with the Contras in Nicaragua.

Some of those objects will be on display at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center, a $60 million underground museum that will be built across the street from the Wall. Crews are expected to break ground in 2010 and construction should last 18 months.

THE DESIGN

Scruggs and other organizers had four requirements for the memorial. It had to be reflective and contemplative; harmonize with its surroundings; contain the names of those who died or were missing and presumed dead; and make no political statement.

More than 1,400 designers entered a design competition. Veterans, architects and artists narrowed the field to a handful of entries.

At the end of the anonymous design competition, jurors selected an entry by Maya Lin, a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale University. Lin entered the contest as an assignment for a mortuary-design class and was suddenly thrust into a national debate about politics and art.

Her age as well as her Chinese heritage incensed some veterans groups.

Other veterans found the V-shaped design itself distasteful, comparing it to a “scar” or calling it “death-oriented” and “unheroic,” partly because it lacked traditional patriotic elements. The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts ordered the addition of a statue of three soldiers and a flagpole as a compromise.

Today, few visitors protest the design. Lin envisioned the Wall as an abstraction, instead of the conventional white marble statue. She chose the reflective black granite because it brings the past and the present together, as visitors see the names etched upon their own image. “Before it was built, people really couldn’t appreciate it,” Scruggs said. “Once it was built, the controversy became a footnote to history.”

QUICK FACTS ABOUT THE NAMES

Youngest: a 15-year-old

Oldest: a 62-year-old

Number of 16-year-olds on the Wall: five

Number of 17-year-olds: 12

Number of foreign nationals: 120

Number of countries they represent: 22

Veterans killed on their first day in Vietnam: 997

Veterans killed on their last day in Vietnam: 1,448

Number of women on the Wall: seven

Number of father-son pairs on the Wall: two

To find out more about the Wall and the names, go to http://www.thewall-usa.com