Hey everyone Jody Avergan here. A quick word that we are bringing you a rerun today, an episode from Gaster a couple years ago at this point with just me and Nicole Hemmer.

But this is for Memorial Day. We wanted to bring you an episode we did about the Vietnam War Memorial and when it first

opened in Washington, D.C. One note, you'll notice in here there's a question that I say about

the ongoing war in Afghanistan.

Since we recorded this a couple years ago,

that war has formally come to an end.

But I left that question in just because it leads

to an interesting conversation about how we are continuing

to memorialize and reckon with or not reckon with our more recent wars.

All right, it's a holiday weekend. We are giving ourselves that off. We will be back next week with

brand new episodes. But a lot of you probably haven't heard this episode or

haven't heard it in a while. So here we go and we'll see you soon.

Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from

Radiotopia. My name is Jody African.

This day November 12th 1982 a multi-day ceremony is taking place in Washington, D.C. to dedicate

the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, built in honor of service members who fought and those Americans

who died in the war in Vietnam.

The central feature of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the element that was opened at that

ceremony in 1982 is the memorial wall, two enormous black granite slabs set into the ground sitting in a sort of

v formation engraved with the names of those who died in the war. The Wall initially listed 57,939 names in the

decades since another 500 or so have been added to that list as have some other

elements to the memorial space. This is a site that has seen

...