vietnam veterans’ memorial wall Honoring our Fallen Heroes By Robin Brunet
With 1,534 of the 58,320 names inscribed on its black anodized aluminum surface representing fallen heroes from Indiana, the new Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall at the Veterans National Memorial Shrine and Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana, has a special meaning for veterans in that state, while paying tribute to everyone who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. It is also a source of pride for SMACNA member Morris Sheet Metal Corp and Local 20 Fort Wayne SMART Army, which pooled their resources to turn this long-awaited project into reality. “It first came on our radar in December 2020, when it was announced that a replica of the wall would be erected in Fort Wayne,” recalls Darryl Esterline, business representative for Local 20. “Given the importance of the project to so many families, we told the organizers that SMART Army would volunteer our services to honor our fallen heroes.” The aptly named Healing Wall is an 80% size replica of the actual Vietnam Wall in Washington, DC, standing eight feet tall, 360 feet long, and made up of 72 panels. The arrangement of the wall is such that the names of service members who lost 12 » Partners in Progress » www.pinp.org
their lives are in a ‘V’ configuration, with the eight-foot panels in the middle of the ‘V’ tapering down to the smallest on the ends, which are just two feet tall. The wall toured the country for a decade, and public donations enabled the Shrine to purchase the panels last December, at which point they were put into storage while concrete footers, support structuring for the wall, and surrounding grounds were prepared to receive the panels. The remaining challenge may have been small in size, but it was crucial to the success of the project—a system was required that would fix the panels to the concrete firmly but without undue visual clutter. It was the perfect task for Local 20, which, like SMART Armies in other jurisdictions, is dedicated to investing in its community with volunteer efforts, unity, and outreach. “We had only three weeks to develop a fastener, and standard J-channels would have been inefficient and costly,” Esterline says. “After considering three different concepts and a lot of trial and error, we created a blind fastening system whereby each panel would have two male clips on the top and bottom, and the concrete wall where it would attach would have two
