May 2021

American Heritage has launched a petition campaign to ask President Biden to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Scruggs for founding the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, and to celebrate all the Wall stands for in honoring those who served.

Please add your name to the petition if you appreciate the Vietnam Wall, and the men and women who answered the nation's call and sacrificed so much.

You can read more about Jan and the dramatic story of how the Wall was built in "'To Heal a Nation': the Vietnam Wall" by James Reston, Jr. in the new issue of American Heritage Magazine.

More than 2.1 million men and women served in the Vietnam War, many of them draftees who were torn from homes and communities and sent to a far off struggle. But when they returned, these soldiers were too often scorned and humiliated.

Editor’s note:  A.E. Dick Howard is the longest serving law professor at the University of Virginia and an internationally respected authority on constitutional law. In 1971 he helped lead the commission drafting a new constitution for Virginia which largely repudiated the white supremacist legacy of the 1902 Constitution. Prof. Howard also is the author of the two-volume Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia. 

Not far from my home in Charlottesville, Virginia, a larger-than-life bronze statue of Robert E. Lee on his faithful horse Traveler still towers over Market Street Park. In August 2017 the statue was the focus of protests against its proposed removal that drew numerous members of far-right groups, and ended in tragedy. For now, various motions in the local Circuit Court have held off the City Council's decision to remove it, but eventually the Lee statue will follow many other Confederate monuments taken down across the country.

Editor’s Note: James Reston, Jr. is a Vietnam-era veteran and author of seventeen books including A Rift in the Earth: Art, Memory, and the Fight for a Vietnam War Memorial about the founding of the Wall.  His latest book is a 9/11 novel, The Nineteenth Hijacker, published in February.