Today we visited the Vietnam Veteran Memorial. It felt incredibly real and sad because there was a group of veterans who fought in the war and they were looking for names of people who they had been fighting with who had died or gone missing in the war. The bit that I found most incredible were the amount of names of those who died fighting in the war. There were 58,267 people who died or went missing in the war.

One of the things I didn’t realise to begin with was how long and how recent the war was. The war started on the 1 November 1955 and it ended 30 April 1975 so it lasted for 19.5 years.

Three of the best facts I learnt today were:

• the war went on so long and so many people died that the people in America got bored and didn’t want their country to be associated with the war, so when the soldiers got back they were expecting to be welcomed like heroes but instead they arrived back in the USA and nobody seemed to notice 
• the wall is 246.75 ft long
• each name is followed by either a cross or a diamond. A diamond represents someone who died in the war and a cross represents someone who went missing or got captured.

Fin