The Wall That Heals, a traveling replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is returning to Delaware on Tuesday.
The Vietnam War memorial will be escorted by Delaware State Police and veterans on motorcycles to New Castle where it will be met by students and volunteers at Southern Elementary School around 1:45 p.m. on Tuesday and William Penn High school around 2:30 p.m.
The Wall That Heals is a mobile exhibit that features a three-quarter scale replica of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.
The exhibit comes to New Castle from Knoxville, Tennessee, having visited Bay St. Louis, Missouri; Garner, North Carolina; and Crawfordsville, Arkansas as the first few stops of the 2022 tour.
The replica was built in 1996 and stands 7 feet 6 inches high at its tallest point and is 375 feet in length. Similar to the original, it is erected in a chevron shape and allows visitors to do name rubbings of individual service members’ names. Visitors can also experience The Wall rising above them as they walk towards the apex, a key feature of the D.C. memorial.
The Wall consists of140 numbered panels that hold more than 58,000 names, illuminated by LED lighting for day and night visibility.
The names are listed by day of casualty and begin at the center/apex, with names starting on the East Wall, on the right, and working their way out to the end of that wing before picking up at the far end of the West Wall, on the left.
From there, the names work their way back to the center/apex, symbolically joining the beginning and end of the conflict.
After arriving at William Penn High School, the first school in the nation to host the wall, set up will begin on April 27.
The Wall will be open to the public 24 hours a day starting April 29 to May 1 until 2 p.m.
More than 100 volunteers are needed to guard the wall, help with parking and assist with events over the next few days.
On April 28, an opening ceremony begins at 9 a.m. with a Prisoner of War keynote speaker.
A candlelight vigil will be held at 8 p.m. on April 30 to read names of Hometown Heroes from the exhibit with a procession along the wall.
There will also be a keynote address from Ret. Major General Frank Vavala and a reading of ‘In Memory’ names.
The exhibit previously visited Delaware at the Legislative Hall in Dover in 1998 and at Delaware Technical Community College’s Owens Campus in 2016.
The Wall That Heals serves as a way for “the souls enshrined on the Memorial to exist once more among family and friends in the peace and comfort of familiar surroundings,” according to the memorial’s website.
The traveling exhibit also eases the healing process by allowing veterans who have been unable to visit the memorial in D.C. to face The Wall within their own communities.
In 2021, The Wall That Heals traveled over 13,000 miles and visited 26 communities, escorted by more than 3,000 vehicles. Tours of the exhibit were provided to upwards of 12,000 students and The Wall was visited by almost 200,000 people.
If you would like to be a volunteer for The Wall That Heals in Delaware, visit www.colonialschooldistrict.org/williampenn/the-wall-that-heals/ and click “volunteer.”
