The Wall That Heals, a travelling ¾-scale replica of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, will not be coming to Garner’s Lake Benson Park in April. The Wall’s display here has been postponed because of the coronavirus.
“The visit hasn’t been cancelled; it has been postponed,” said Tim Stevens, who was spearheading the effort to display the wall here in honor of our community’s Vietnam veterans. “We hope to schedule The Wall to come in 2021 or 2022.”
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund received more than 130 invitations from communities to host The Wall last year and Garner was among the 30 or so communities that were selected.
Stevens said the VVMF would begin accepting invitations for 2021 on May 25, 2020. The VVMF schedules a national tour with The Wall spending about a week at each of the selected sites. This year’s tour was to visit 20 different states.
“There is no guarantee that we’ll be selected again, but I’m optimistic,” Stevens said. “The VVMF has said it will work with us, and the other sites that had to postpone, to reschedule.”
Most of the donations that were made to bring The Wall to Garner are being saved to use when The Wall is brought here in the next couple of years.
“We had already spent some of our donations on advertising and other start up expenses, but every other dollar has been designated for The Wall in 2021 or 2022,” Stevens said.
The committee that worked on bringing The Wall here this year is expected to pick up preparations where it stopped this year.
“One of the best things we did was set our website, garnerwall.com,” Stevens said. “We have tons of information on the site and we are going to keep it active. We have pictures and stories of about 70 area men who went to Vietnam and other stories on the men from Wake County and Johnston County who were killed in the war.”