Larry Meadows was an Army staff sergeant in Vietnam, hauling fuel in convoys that slogged along dirt roads not far from the North Vietnam border.

He and his well-armed escorts made stops at places like Dong Ha, Khe Sanh and Camp Eagle, providing gasoline and diesel fuel for the Marines and Army.

“It was serious. It was a learning experience and I don’t think I could have gotten it anywhere else,” he said recently, sitting in the office of his construction business in Tonganoxie.

At 27 years old, Meadows was one of the older heads in his unit during his 11-month Vietnam tour. His Kansas City Army Reserve unit was called to active duty in 1969.

Meadows, 61, is among the thousands of Americans for whom “the wall” — the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — has special meaning.

“You read about how young the average age is of the men whose names are on the wall in Washington,” he said, “and you just …”

He didn’t complete the sentence but looked at the floor, shaking his head.

“That wall is a serious thing in that it recognizes those people who didn’t come home and gave the ultimate sacrifice. … It’s something that bears their names … something that’s actually real,” he said. “The people, the average person on the street, needs to realize that there are 58-plus thousand names on the wall that need to be respected.”

Meadows was so impressed by his visit to the wall that he worked three years to get the Moving Wall, an exact but scaled-down aluminum replica of the granite wall, to Tonganoxie. Meadows and his Veterans of Foreign Wars buddies arranged to get the wall there twice, in 1996 and again in 1999.

“I realized there are a lot of people in our area that’s not going to make the trip to Washington and this model would be the closest thing they’ll ever see,” he said.

Meadows described the emotions he’s seen as people walk past the Moving Wall.

“It’s a very touching time for most people,” he said, “and it’s hard to keep from being choked up, you know.”

Some Vietnam veterans in the Tonganoxie area still couldn’t bring themselves to visit the wall, he said.

The wall

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In November 1982, days before the dedication of the memorial, 150,000 veterans of the war in Southeast Asia gathered in Washington, D.C., to participate in what was dubbed “A National Salute to Vietnam Veterans.”

There were parades of fatigue-jacketed vets decorated with combat medals and ribbons. Many sported defiantly long hair and ball caps heavy with military unit pins. There was a musical tribute headlined by actor and World War II veteran Jimmy Stewart, and at the National Cathedral hundreds of volunteers read the names of 57,939 Americans who died in Vietnam.

By then the war had been over nearly 10 years, and Vietnam veterans were finally getting positive recognition for answering the call to an unpopular war. Many who came to Washington still felt betrayed by their government and spoke openly of bitter memories and ungrateful homecomings.

It was a week filled with open displays of emotion and camaraderie. The “no-alcohol” ban on the National Mall was loosely enforced for a week.

Even before it was dedicated, the memorial wall was knocked by civilians and veterans. Some complained it wasn’t white like the other monuments. It is black, a color associated with evil and bad guys. Some noted it was shaped in a V like the peace sign. And many complained because it was designed by a woman of Asian descent. Weren’t there any “American” designers available?

Author Tom Wolfe took his shots, writing it was “positively skill proof … a giant pitiless tombstone … not even a flag.”

The wall’s creator, Maya Ying Lin, was a 21-year-old Yale architectural student when she submitted her design as a class assignment. It was chosen in a nationwide competition from 1,421 entries. She was born in Athens, Ohio, to Chinese parents.

Lin’s written response to critics: The memorial is black because white south-facing stone would blind its viewers with reflected sunlight. It was shaped in a V to point toward the Washington Monument to the east and the Lincoln Memorial to the west, placing the memorial in a historical context.

The wall was dedicated Nov. 13, 1982.

An emotional experience

Despite the criticism, visitors immediately flocked to the memorial. Then as now, many found visiting the wall an emotional experience.

In 1983, due to the unexpected amount of foot traffic, a stone walkway replaced the grass in front of the memorial. A year later, lights were added for after-dark visitors, along with a flagpole and a Frederick Hart statue of three well-armed GIs. In 1993, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial and a nurses statue by Glenna Goodacre were added.

Last week, Congress passed a bill authorizing a Vietnam Veterans Memorial Visitor Center to be built on the Mall. Among the displays will be photographs of those who were killed or remain missing and the 60,000 items that have been left at the Wall. The $13 million project will be financed by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation and is to take three years to complete.

Today, the wall is the most-visited memorial in Washington, attracting more than 4 million people a year.

Many think it inspired the Korean War Memorial and possibly the Mall’s World War II Memorial due to be dedicated May 29, 2004. And every state in the nation now has a Vietnam memorial.

The memorial was the brainchild of Jan Scruggs, a veteran wounded in Vietnam and cited for bravery. In 1979 he founded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and launched it with $2,800 of his own money. The fund raised $8.4 million to pay for the memorial through donations from more than 275,000 individuals. The foundation, of which Scruggs is president, maintains the memorial through the National Park Service.