After national monuments closed due to the government shutdown, the Georgetown University Student Veterans Association and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Foundation arranged with the University to bring The Wall That Heals, a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, to Healy Lawn.
“The VVMF came to [GUSVA] for the location. It was either Georgetown or Arlington National Cemetery,” Thomas Mitchell Gibbons-Neff (COL ‘15), president of GUSVA, wrote in an email to the Voice. “The Cemetery never got back to the VVMF.”
The wall spans Healy Lawn across from Lauinger Library, dedicated to Joseph Mark Lauinger (COL ‘67), one of the 23 Georgetown alumni killed in combat in the Vietnam War. An accompanying trailer contains a few examples of the 400,000 items people have left at the memorial.
University administrators hope that having the memorial on campus will benefit both visitors and students. “Unfortunately, students don’t always take advantage of [opportunities to see D.C.],” Georgetown’s veterans office coordinator David Shearman (SFS ‘11, GRAD ‘14) said.
Gibbons-Neff acknowledged that the memorial was a bit of a surprise to students. “It wasn’t publicized more because it all came together in the course of 24 hours, as the shutdown is a pretty recent thing and securing Healy via the President’s office happened on Sunday,” he wrote.
Both GUSVA and VVMF expect the traffic to the memorial to drastically pick up this weekend and estimate hundreds will visit each day.
To transport tourists to the attraction, a free shuttle connecting Georgetown to the National Mall will run every hour from 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. while the memorial is open on campus through Monday.
