Gifts of Remembrance at the Wall
Near the base of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, comrades and loved ones leave their poignant tokens of remembrance
The photographs in Offerings at the Wall, from by Turner Publishing Inc., record some of the 30,000 objects and letters that have been placed at The Wall, as if at a shrine, by relatives and comrades of the men and women there memorialized.
These gifts of remembrance combat boots and service decorations, baby shoes and mortarboard tassels, baseball gloves and snapshots-are gathered each day by volunteers and preserved by the National Park Service in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection. Five hundred of the objects are on view in an exhibition at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.