After the fall of Saigon in May 1975, most Americans wanted to forget the Vietnam War and the servicemen who had fought there for sixteen years. Inspired by the film The Deerhunter (1978), Jan Scruggs formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which sponsored a design search for a memorial for this difficult war. Maya Lin, an architecture student at Yale, submitted the winning design: a black granite V-shaped wall nestled in the ground below the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, which both bears the names of over 58,000 American dead and reflects the faces of those who look at “the Wall.” Although some veterans and administration officials considered the memorial insufficiently heroic, after its 1982 consecration “the Wall” quickly became a place of remembrance and catharsis for civilians and veterans, with people leaving gifts and letters for lost comrades and family members.