Answer:
On November 11, 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) was completed, ten years after the end of the bitter and divisive Vietnam War that tore the United States apart. After ten years of shame, anger, and painful fights over US participation in the Vietnam War, the sacrifice and courage of the soldiers who fought was finally to be recognized and remembered. Speaking at the wall for a Veterans Day ceremony, President Reagan declared, “The night is over. We see these men and know them once again and know how much we owe them, how much they’ve given us, and how much we can never fully repay” ( Reagan 2). However, in light of the conflict surrounding the Vietnam War, the impact of the form of the memorial on the memorialization process and the overall memory of the Vietnam War remains in question.Psychologists define memory as “the processes that are used to acquire, store, retain and later retrieve information” (Cherry 1). This is traditionally broken into three phases: encoding, storage, and retrieval. While the encoding and storage phases both refer to the creation of memory, retrieval is focused on the process of recalling memory.