I saw this in Yahoo News today and wanted to share it. To those of you that have seen the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, you know why anyone finds viewing it "emotionally moving".
Family and friends of servicemen and women who died or vanished in the Vietnam War no longer have to travel to Washington to pay their respects at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
An interactive version debuts online this week, a project of historical document archive site Footnote.com in conjunction with the National Archives and Records Administration.
The virtual version of the famous memorial — which is a pair of 246-foot black granite walls inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 American military casualties — is searchable.
Every name etched onto the real-world wall is viewable online and linked to the veteran's service record. Online visitors can add photos and describe their memories of the servicemen and women who died in the war.
"The memorial is a historical document that obviously is very emotional," he says. "We want the site to help people come together to remember the veterans who were lost."
More than 2,000 photos were taken of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall to create the online version, Wilding said. He said the resulting image is the equivalent of 460 feet wide and the largest of its kind on the Web.
Wednesday was the 26th anniversary of the groundbreaking for construction of the wall, which was completed in November 1982 and officially became a National Monument two years later.
Click here to see the wall
2 comments:
Thank you for sharing this Iggy. I have seen the memorial and the best way I can describe it is that my heart was in my throat and I thought I couldn't breathe. It was one of the most moving experiences of my life. The shadows of the wall cooled us from the heat as we took in the incomprehensible number of names and the emotional mementoes left at the base of the wall... treasures that even thieves respected and left alone. The Wall will always stand out as one of my most emotional memories.
I've never been to the Wall but I've heard how emotional it can be. They have the "moving wall" that goes around the country and it was in a town an hour or so from us last year. (i think it was last year) The news stations showed it on their newscasts. Standing there at the Wall must be one of those moments where you wonder how it all started. :(
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