Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Blue, green, and black geometric representation of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Yellow text appears around the illustration on a black background.

After Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs’s conception of a Vietnam memorial, a nationwide competition was conducted to find a designer. The winning design was by Yale architecture student, Maya Lin, and her now iconic memorial features two 200-foot-long walls engraved chronologically with over 58,000 names of deceased or missing people who had served in the war. 

After seeing how the wall affected people emotionally, The Friends of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was established as a volunteer, non-profit organization dedicated to extending free services such as name rubbings, Father’s Day Remembrances, and other services related to the memorial.