PBS Explores The Life And Talent Of Architect Maya Lin. By Margaret Regan LONG YEARS AGO, when I was in eighth grade, the nun would let us stand up and look out the classroom window whenever there was a funeral going on at the church across the street. Usually the gray metal coffin being hauled up the outdoor staircase carried some parishioner's grandmother or grandfather. But in the funeral that I remember best from that year you couldn't see the casket's shiny metal surface because it was draped with an American flag. Inside was the body of 18-year-old Michael Callahan, brother of Joseph in our class, dead of war wounds suffered in Vietnam. I thought of Michael again a few summers ago on my first visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The Memorial, as it's been written countless times, is a long black scar in the earth. Arranged in a V-shape on land near the Washington Monument, its granite walls are engraved with the names of the 57,661 Americans who died in the war. The names are listed chronologically by year of death, so when you first enter the monument the wall is rather short, naming the few who died each year in the late '50s and early '60s. As the years go on, though, as the names of dead boys mount up into the thousands and thousands, you must travel deeper into the earth. The wall gets larger and larger, to accommodate the sheer volume of names, and by the time you reach the middle, the section memorializing the war's bloodiest years, you feel overwhelmed by death. After searching in a nearby book register that lists locations, I found Michael's name near the wall's midpoint, where the granite extends highest and deepest. To see in this public place the name of the young boy from my hometown, to touch its carved letters, was extraordinarily emotional. By consecrating the name of one person I knew, it brought back to me full force all the widespread grief occasioned by that stupid war. With each name, the memorial moves fluidly between the individual and the universal. Nowadays, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the most visited, and hands-down the most powerful, of all the many public monuments in the nation's capital. Next Wednesday, PBS will air the documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, an Academy Award-winning portrait of the young woman who designed the memorial. Put together over a five-year-period by filmmaker Freida Lee Mock, the movie traces Lin's career, through old footage and new interviews, looking not only at her Vietnam piece, but also at her other public works, including the Civil Rights Monument in Montgomery, Alabama. But the movie's story of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the most compelling. Maya Lin was a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale when she won the design contest for the memorial back in 1981. Competing against some 1,440 other entrants, including some of the best-known and highest-priced architects in the nation, Lin won for the simplicity and power of her design. Jan Scruggs, the Vietnam vet who had lobbied for the memorial, remembers in an interview in the film that the "committee was persuaded that (Lin's design) would be a world-class work of art, not an average memorial." And he adds, in a masterpiece of understatement, the committee also knew "it would be a PR problem." In fact, the design created a political firestorm, one which Lin readily acknowledges had more to do with the still festering wounds of the war than with her artwork. One vet denounced it as "dishonorable," a "black hole" colored in the "universal color of sorrow and shame and degradation." Perennial troublemaker Pat Buchanan declared the distinguished art and architectural jurors on the selection committee were a pack of Communists and antiwar lefties. Some opponents were outraged that a "gook"--Lin is Chinese-American--had been picked. Interior Secretary James Watt threatened to withhold funds if the committee did not agree to some changes. What opponents wanted was to add a realistic statue of some soldiers, a patriotic American flag planted at dead center, a color change to white, and an elevation change. In short, what they wanted, as one critic pointed out, was a big white fence. It's nothing short of amazing to watch the young Lin stand up to the opposition in the old clips. Calmly, she speaks her piece to the nation's movers and shakers, declaring the proposed changes were "intrusions" that would convert the original design into a mere backdrop, and rip apart the corner meeting place of the names of the dead. She prevailed, but there were compromises. A statue of soldiers and a flag were added near the entrance, where they are not as obtrusive as they might have been. The film is an instructive piece about the collision between politics and an artist's "strong clear vision." It airs Lin's conviction that true art is transcendent, that its job is to push past convention and bring people to new understanding. And that her memorial has done, for the countless survivors, veterans and families who leave their offerings along its shiny surfaces. One vet thanks her in the film, saying, "Numbers are just numbers, but when we look at the wall we see our names chiseled in stone." The memorial also works for people like me, who lost no loved ones but nevertheless were affected by the loss around us. And it continues to work across time, on many levels. It made me think how odd it was that Michael Callahan, once an older man to my prepubescent self, now seems like such a young boy. And now that I'm a mother, it made me think with horror of future needless deaths. As one of Lin's Yale profs, the distinguished architect Vincent Scully, says in the film, the memorial far outstrips the particularities of the Vietnam War. "It's about all wars, all deaths," he says with wonder, "about all the living and all the dead. And done by a girl of 20." May Lin: A Strong Clear Vision airs locally at 9:30 p.m., Wednesday, November 27, on KUAT Channel 6.

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