Replicating The Wall
by Alphaville Herald on 05/11/07 at 12:30 pm
Vietnam Veteran’s War Memorial Wall in Second Life
by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk
3 Soldiers Statue
An in-world replica of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Wall in Washington, DC opens to the public on November 7th as part of the 25 anniversary of the real life monument. Generally, real-life in Second Life holds little interest for me – why recreate what we already have in real life when we should be able to do better here? But when Evian Argus was willing to preview of “The Wall” island, I was curious. I’ve visited the real life Memorial Wall several times – would an SL recreation be handled well, and evoke the same sort of emotional response?
The SL replica was built by with funding provided by the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial Fund and is to remain open indefinitely. Mr. Argus told me that they originally tried using sculpties for the two statues that are part of the memorial, but found more traditional prim-based sculpture worked better. Meleni Fairymedow created replicas of both the 3 soldiers statue and the women’s memorial which I found evocative of the real thing – and certainly no prim expense was spared for the statues – each has over 500 prims according to Mr. Argus.
Vietnam Veteran’s Women’s Memorial
The centerpiece of the memorial is a black stone wall sunk into the earth with the names of the dead and missing for each year of the Vietnam conflict. Part of the emotional impact of the real life wall is the literal of descent into the quagmire while looking for a name. This is recreated reasonably well if you are willing to wait a bit, and use the control-0 and control-8 commands – the texture of the wall resolves well enough to read the names, and mouselook is also a help.
58,223 dead and missing
A particularly touching part of the real life memorial is the small flags and flowers that people place by the foot of the wall – and the builder Meme Science has included both a directory that helps you locate names, and place a flag or a flower by that part of the wall where the name is located.
Covering this story for the Herald reminded me again why Second Life remains interesting despite the tawdry hyper-commercialism Linden Lab built into the DNA of the metaverse. Occasionally, someone manages to juxtapose the right symbols to create a strong emotional resonance – and for me this was one of those times. The builders for this memorial already had an advantage – they are recreating an emotionally charged site – but hijacking emotions is a key part of standard political, advertising, and griefing toolkits and Second Life is a giant case study in how this is accomplished in an immersive space. I’d like to think that sometimes playing to emotions can be used for a good cause – and perhaps this was one of those times.
I had teleported in to “The Wall” sim with the same sort of mixed feelings I get when going to movies based on books I like – would they be able to pull it off? While a few rough edges were still be worked out when I visited, I was surprised by how well the recreation worked, and ended up with the same lump in my throat that I get when visiting the real thing. I then spent the rest of the weekend wondering if we will ever learn from our mistakes – exactly the same thing that happens to me after visiting the memorial in real life.
Maximilian Goldflake
Nov 5th, 2007
“…why recreate what we already have in real life when we should be able to do better here?”
Many people are unable to visit the places recreated in SL. I am a big proponent of recreating RL in SL. People can now experience the impact of the memorial without having to travel to DC to do so. Yes, sometimes you can do better. Other times, you can not.
Why Bother
Nov 5th, 2007
What’s this a worthwhile article on the Herald? Then again we’re probably going to get 5 PN/b/tard articles in exchange for this worthwhile one.
Good article though, I’ll give you guys that. It’s too bad you’ll fall back on trash after this.
Maria Leveaux
Nov 5th, 2007
I’m 100% behind this Idea, and i will Visit Very Soon.
What a marvelous idea for those of us Who do not have Access to Inexpensive Travel. I have an Older Cousin who fought in Viet Nam (He was wounded Three times) Fortunately he came out of it Alive and whole. He had many friends who did not.
Maria.
Chris
Nov 6th, 2007
I can’t get the panel with my dad’s name to rez.
Oh well, I did leave a yellow rose and meditated for a bit.
Thank you for this article. I wouldn’t have known otherwise and I have never been able to make it to the real life memorial, so beaing able to visit this SL version touched me deeply.
Lewis Nerd
Nov 6th, 2007
So let me get this straight… nazi uniforms (connected with one war) isn’t allowed, but a whole sim dedicated to another war (Vietnam) is?
Katiroth
Nov 6th, 2007
I was a reader at one of the places the traveling wall stopped at, and when I was able to go to Washington DC, that was one place I made absolute sure I visited. So I’ll definitely be going to this one.
Thank you for an article that was actually of use to me.
just askin
Nov 6th, 2007
The names on this monument, are they the names of US victims, or also of victims the US made?
Clarrice
Nov 6th, 2007
Good article, I plan on visiting as well. The sculptures look great.
Nina A
Nov 6th, 2007
Well done for all the hard work. It would be interesting to take full advantage of SL by building one huge virtual worldwide memorial to fallen soldiers. It would be a huge undertaking.
marilyn murphy
Nov 6th, 2007
my husband is a viet nam veteran. we have been to the wall 3 times. it seems to draw him at times.
we recently purchased a nice dark heavy wood table for our home. when it arrived it had a sticker on the bottom that said, “made in viet nam”. he studied that sticker for a long time. after a while he said, ” i don’t want our son to go into the military. it seems that armed conflict serves only to cull young men out of the species.” i tend to agree.
i would like to visit this wall. thank you for drawing attention to it.
Aya Pelous
Nov 6th, 2007
Nazi uniforms arnt something to memorialize. Asshole.
maximilian goldflake
Nov 6th, 2007
“So let me get this straight… nazi uniforms (connected with one war) isn’t allowed, but a whole sim dedicated to another war (Vietnam) is?”
Don’t play stupid. You know what the difference is.
Chris
Nov 6th, 2007
Leave it to Lewis to take a cheap shot. I am sure many of your elder countrymen would just LOVE to hear you spout off like that about Nazis, trivializing what they went through, just so you could take a swipe at someone else, you fat assed spoiled brat. The English, of all people, should not toss around ridiculous Nazi references in an attempt to sound to clever and wry. It’s really easy for people who weren’t even born yet to make idiotic attempts at wry sarcasm at the expense of others, isn’t it?
Listen pal, that memorial is for the men and the families of the men who died. It was funded almost entirely by donations. It was designed by a 21 year old woman of Chinese ancestry! She intentionally did not include patriotic statues or writings in her design.
It’s not a shrine to glorify the Vietnam war. Nobody could possibly be angrier about that war than those who lost loved ones there. And lets remember shall we, that it was a French war that we got roped into. Yeah, we handled it poorly from there, but that’s no reason to act like a jackass in front of people who lost loved ones. You are Christian as you keep reminding us Lewis, why don’t you damned well act like one? Rise above? I am so sure Jesus is proud of you.
I understand that people are angry with America (as they should be and as am I) because of the way the government has behaved, especially in the past few years, but that doesn’t mean you get to piss on people who lost friends or family in Vietnam.
Go make your puerile and off-base political jabs somewhere else.
Angel
Nov 6th, 2007
One side of me says “This is a great thing, and one that will hopefully teach the real human cost of war to a large group of people who would have no chance of seeing the monument in real life wither due to situation or sheer distance.”
The other side thinks…
>> “I then spent the rest of the weekend wondering if we will ever learn from our mistakes”
I think the current real world climate shows the imperialist American state has not learnt. They still send their own sons into other countries to impose their fake morality and society by dying or killing other people’s sons.
The way to change society and America’s imperialistic views is through slow change. Every person who visits and is touched is one that may add their voice to those of the world community who wish to see imperialistic America join the rest of us and not keep trying to take us over.
Chris
Nov 6th, 2007
I agree Angel, and I often wonder why it is, that so many Vietnam veterans “get it” and are VEHEMENTLY anti-war, yet the idiots in charge just don’t see or don’t care. I suppose that’s what happens when they themselves didn’t have to sacrifice like the common man did. And of course, they found all sorts of ways to keep themselves and their own kids out of harm’s way.
Anyway, I don’t want to make this about those assholes in charge, because it’s not, and that’s not at all what the people who first envisioned this memorial imagined.
It’s an intentionally simplistic build where people can go to remember the friends and loved ones they lost.
Lewis Nerd
Nov 6th, 2007
“Chris”, whoever you are, if you don’t have the balls to identify yourself, keep your comments to yourself.
io Kukulcan
Nov 6th, 2007
Lewis Nerd, why do you defend yourself when you clearly are just trying way too hard to sound clever? Like oh, look at you, aren’t you so observant and sly and wry and all that crap that only serves to make you look ugly and uninformed? If you’d like to defend your stupid, obvious, and tired actions to me, because maybe just maybe I’m not “getting” it; go ahead and contact me in game, “io Kukulcan” is my name in game. From there maybe we could discuss it in rl, I’m not a big guy, only 5’9″, 175 lbs, 34 years old. But I’d still be happy to talk about this with you.
Chris
Nov 6th, 2007
I did ID myself fat ass, I’m Chris. I am the son of a person named Dennis who was killed in Vietnam. That’s all you need to know cake-eater. And YOU ARE NOT “Lewis Nerd”, unless you’re as delusional as you mentor Prok, so spare me the indignation please.
Why do fat asses like yourself and Prok pretend to worry about the identity of the messenger?
I’ll tell you why, because you know you have no real defense against the points made. So you try to dismiss people through this fake “OMG YER NOT IDENTFYING YOUR SL PERSONA!”
So transparent.
Prokofy Neva
Nov 7th, 2007
Chris, you *fuckwad* — I don’t care WHAT happened to your father, you’re not entitled to falsely claim I’m a “mentor” of Lewis Nerd.
I have absolutely NOTHING to do with Lewis Nerd. In fact, while I defended him on purely free speech grounds when he was warned on the official forums, he wasn’t “a friend.” In fact, he began to treat me terribly when I made it clear I didn’t agree with his take on commerce and other issues, and he has totally trashed me at Second Citizen and has written the most God-awful stuff here at the Herald. You are merely talking out of your ass.
You’re also painfully ignorant about the Vietnam War, and my God, even losing your father there isn’t helping your ignorance — and no, you don’to get to emotionally blackmail us all on a forums and deprive us of the moral right to stand up to you. It’s not “about getting dragged into something by the French”. It’s about *communism*. That’s a real thing, that you may snort and laugh at but that’s because you’re poorly educated and brainless to boot.
Take a look at the tens of thousands of people massacred by the communists in the North, which was the entire point of this war, in case that failed to penetrate. YOU may not believe in the domino theory; a leftoid like Peter Ludlow may not believe in the domino; trust me, the people upon whom the domino fell believed in it!
Your father died fighting the spread of communism. If you could see some of the gigantic mounds of mass graves and skulls from communism, you’d maybe take a step back and realize what your father achieved, if nothing else penetrates.
Was it a good idea to go around the world fighting communists backed by the Soviets/Russians? Is it a good idea to go fight Islamo-fascists, as they are called, in the Middle East, who produce mass graves like the North Vietname did?
Likely not — all it does is aggravate them, make them bind together, and give America a black eye. It is likely very mistaken to try to “export” these values of democracy and human rights. This can easily be debated — and intelligently debated if you have some intelligent interlocutors.
However, that doesn’t mean that the values of democracy and human rights themselves are wrong or broken. It doesn’t mean there *isn’t* a reason to fight these communists, these fascists, these thugs. Of course there is. And people *in those countries* fight them first and foremost. And they don’t weep over table labels and sing pious songs about peace, because they are trying to protect their families or livlihoods. Are we to stand idly by and see them mowed down as we saw the monks of Burma mowed down by the junta?
No, we need some kind of movement that says “no” to this kind of thuggishness and doesn’t whitewash it or dismiss it or even ridicule the concern with it, all in the name of being able to critique America throwing its weight around in the world. We can do *both*. It *is* possible. And it just takes a little more thought and nuance and study than apparently you and the other posters are willing to put into it.
As for Lewis, I’ve come to the conclusion he is suffering from some condition, as his behaviour has been very surly and erratic and mean lately, and he has swung from being Mr. Helpful Hal to being nasty, and discontinuing his Helpful Hal stuff in SL. So perhaps real life or SL issues have depressed him and he feels entitled to lash out on a forums and hurt a stranger. God knows, Second Life is full of such spite and malice.
It’s perfectly fine to have a memorial to the soldiers who died in Vietnam. We don’t have to genuflect in four directions, prostrate ourselves, and somehow enable the horrors of My Lai to cancel out what a soldier’s death means to a family. It’s possible to question America’s actions, question it’s poor decisions or murderous excesses, while also being able to mourn those soldiers’ deaths, understand the loss, and even respect their struggle and the intention of fighting communism, which, my God, was a *good* thing — and if you think otherwise, you have never been at a mass grave or seen the victims of *those* systems — which don’t tend to rise to the level of affluence that the U.S. and Europe have and produced subsequent generations of spoiled, entitlement-happy idiots who get on forums and spout nonsense.
As for culling men out of the species, the first people to do that are the terror-regimes that cull their own young men first — causing other young men to stop them. Try to get that straight in your head, please.
Prokofy Neva
Nov 7th, 2007
>Every person who visits and is touched is one that may add their voice to those of the world community who wish to see imperialistic America join the rest of us and not keep trying to take us over.
Um, the greatest mass murders done in this last century are by:
Nazi Germany
Cambodia
China
Soviet Union
Sudan
What was your plan for stopping any of those far, far worse tragedies? Did you have one?
Hey, each time an uneducated Internet-memed idiot like yourself spouts off anonymously on a forum, and we can push back, it’s another brick out of the wall : )
Nat
Nov 7th, 2007
You forgot a few Prok.
Saddam, the whole mess in Africa and even a few others I’d also count in on the list.
And ehm… The main message of monuments like this, is generally “This shouldnever happen again” and generally to learn from the mistakes of the past.
Only, people never seem to remember that other then on the special occaisions years later… for one day, then go on with their lives like nothing ever happened, and happily send their sons into another senseless war that will have no victory, only casualties, without making use of their rights to say no and stand up to those eager to wage war for profit.
Humanity will never learn, sadly.
shockwave yareach
Nov 7th, 2007
If we intervene, then we are hatefilled warmongers. If we don’t, then we don’t give a damn about all those other colored folks.
Can’t win. Frankly, I no longer care. Humanity sucks, so I ignore it. The little kids are going to kill themselves whether I care/intervene or not, so it’s on them, not me. If they want peace, let them prove it by actually creating it themselves. I’m done – the world is on its own.
Lewis Nerd
Nov 7th, 2007
I really don’t have a clue what you’re talking about Prok, so please stop trying to psycho-analyse me. If you have something to say to me, you know where to reach me. Here is not the place for it.
There’s nothing wrong with me, I don’t suffer from any ‘conditions’ except probably frustration about the crap some people throw at me, and Linden Lab not listening. At least I got to shout at Zee Linden last night at a developers meeting and he apologised profusely.
Lewis
ReveNews Online Revenue News & Opinions Since 1998
Nov 7th, 2007
Attention Economy is Powered by Stories
The other day I commented some on the A = R formula that Mark at 45n5′s and he did an interesting video piece. He covered attention, revenue and threw in scalability for good measure. It was refreshing to see longer term thinking. Attention That is the…
Cocoanut Koala
Nov 7th, 2007
My goodness, Prok sure does mentor a lot of people! Not just 14-year-olds with sub-par intelligence who can’t think for themselves, like me, but even those he doesn’t like and who dislike him!
The build is very, very beautiful, from these pictures. Gorgeous, and a bravura effort.
coco
marilyn murphy
Nov 8th, 2007
prok: well. see it’s a very personal thing on one level. if there was a lesson to be learned from the viet nam conflict, im not sure what it was. yes we should fight for the “right” causes. however, in the case of vietnam, the communist north took over the south. vietnam is a communist country today. obviously america has trade agreements with vietnam now that allows them to import their goods to us.
what did the sacrifices and the deaths of all those young american men really accomplish? a delay to the takeover? in the meantime over a million vietnamese died while america was there.
i am not anti america. at all. america tries so very hard to do right in the world i think.
the real lesson, i think, is that unless a people truly wish to be free, and are willing to fight for their own freedom, that america will fail to establish democracy in that country, wherever that may be. how do we judge if a people are wanting to be free? i dont know. the phillipines truly wanted to be free, and helped us to liberate them from japan. same for western europe and the nazis. after that, finding the people or the circumstance that will let democracy prevail due to the will of the people has been very hard to come by.
Land of the Free?
Nov 8th, 2007
marilyn murphy above has a good point about that you cannot free people if they don’t truly want the help.
One thing tho, a democracy doesn’t guarantee freedom…
The US itself is a good example. I wouln’t want to call a country free if it’s citizens have to be careful what to say on the phone, or possibly be seen as a terrorist.
Double Veteran
Nov 8th, 2007
“Hey GI, you got girlfriend Vietnam? Me so horny. Me love you long time.”
AWM Mars
Nov 11th, 2007
I am not American.. I have no history to the Vietnam War.. only reading at the time, from a distance. I have read about The Wall in RL…
I was invited to see the project in SL and was immediately sucked in by the atmosphere created. Personally, I believe that the Wall is a place where we as a race, can aknowledge and honour those that gave their lives.. the victums of foolish politics and those that practise them for agendas unbeknown to those sent, to risk their lives.
What I saw, was a place that gives a credible side to Second Life.. a place for those, wherever they may be in the world, to reach out and remember.. a place ‘to be’ whereby they can share in the moment at those times when distance and finaces, may inhibit or exclude them. I created a movie, in the hope to signify the transition between what is in RL and what was now, in SL.. allowing those to visualise and capture the ambience recreated. This is no publicity stunt, nor created for recognition of talent/skills… what has been acheived successfully, is the ‘to be’.
Chris
Nov 13th, 2007
LOL prok!
Could you possibly stuff more self-contradictory jingoism into one post? You don’t care about my dad yet you go on to tell me what he was fighting for. You say we should fight communism, and then that we shouldn’t. Do you realize that while your sacred US government was out fighting your communist boogeymen that they were at the same time HELPING brutal dictators elsewhere? Of course you do, and that is why you’re such an ass. Do you realize that your sacred US has killed millions too? You sweep that under the rug because you can’t imagine a world in which the US is not the white hatted good guy, so blinded by propaganda and jingoism are you.
Anyway, I do know quite a LOT about the Vietnam war, and just because I don’t go into a frenzy like you when I see or hear the word “communist” doesn’t mean I don’t know what I am talking about.
As for mentor, maybe that was too strong and unnecessarily pointed, but you two both have that Archie Bunker thing going on and have posted in support of each other in the past, likely because he bought into your whacked out ideas to a certain extent.
I do agree that there is something wrong with him though, something to do with self-loathing probably, not unlike you Prok!
And if I am not entitled to post a claim which you claim is false, then you better get busy scouring your own blogs of thousands of claims which you have made based on “heresay” that you more than likely imagined.
And I AM entitled to as long as the editors here see fit, so sorry, you don’t get to dictate to me what I can and can’t say and what I am entitled to or not.
Fail.