The Virtual Vietnam Wall is a searchable, online, digitized version of the Maya Lin-designed memorial located on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Unveiled in late March 2008, the virtual wall contains the names of every one of the 58,356 U.S. soldiers who died while fighting in the Vietnam War. The virtual wall is a joint project of the National Archives and Footnote.com a website that aims to make available photographic images of original source material. Friends, family, and even strangers are able to connect photos, messages, and tributes to the names on the wall, creating an ever-expanding interactive memorial to the soldiers who lost their lives in Vietnam. Since 1997, another site on the Web, VirtualWall.org, has listed all of the soldiers on the Wall, although not in an official digitized version.
Fast Facts:
- No. of photos taken of wall for project: 6,301
- Average age of those who appear on the Wall: 22.8 years
- The Virtual Wall, at full size, is the same size as the actual Wall: 460 feet wide
- No. of soldiers on Wall listed as "body not recovered": 2,056
- No. of women on wall: 8
- No. of North and South Vietnamese combined military dead, as claimed by Vietnamese government: 1.1 million
