Round Two - Choosing the Design: July 1980 to June 1981

Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth . . . . we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying those individuals into a whole. For this memorial is meant not as a memorial to the individual, but rather as a memorial to the men and women who died during the war, as a whole. -- Maya Ying Lin, March 1981.

Round Two moves from President Carter's approval of the location legislation in July 1980 through the process of articulating goals for a memorial that summer, to announcing a design competition on November 11, 1980, to the end of the competition March 31, 1981, and to the selection of Maya Lin as the winner on May 1, 1981.