The South Dakota Vietnam War Memorial is a tribute to the veterans who returned home from the war to fight a sometimes more painful battle on the homefront. Vietnam was the first war to be brought directly to the American public’s living room with an unending display of graphic imagery: U.S. soldiers firing at unseen enemies in jungles and across rice paddies; medics dodging enemy fire to reach the side of a young soldier covered in blood and near death; and clouds of black smoke rolling skyward from the burning huts of a village destroyed to keep it out of the hands of the Vietcong.
The merits of the war were not just debated at podiums and in war rooms but over dinner tables, in the streets and in the field itself.