How much does it cost to leave a remembrance?  The fallen of the war have already paid the last full measure. You can not pay us a donation or fee and we will will not put advertising on The Virtual Wall. The volunteer staff who work on The Virtual Wall have lost friends or relatives in the war. We will not profit from their loss.

Does this organization maintain the Wall in Washington, DC?  NO. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC is maintained by the US National Park Service using your tax dollars. The Wall is staffed by National Park Service rangers and National Park Service volunteers. The National Park Service provides uniforms, rubbing papers, and other supplies for volunteers. National Park Service employees perform maintenance to care for The Wall, the grounds around it, and such things as setting up the stage and chairs and crowd control for ceremonies.

How many remembrances are on The Virtual Wall?  A "memorial page" is one or a few web pages that honor one particular person. Most memorial pages have several "remembrances." Many have more than ten remembrances. If we told you the number of remembrances you might compare that with the 58,256 names on the Wall, which would be misleading. Someone once suggested we should even count each graphic and photo as a "remembrance" to falsely increase the number. We don't count the graphics and we don't report how many remembrances are published on The Virtual Wall.

How many "hits" does The Virtual Wall get?  The technical definition of "hits" is the total number of files transferred in a day. That count includes each little graphics file, pictures, and backgrounds. The number of hits in a day is therefore many, many, times larger than the number of persons who visited the site that day. For example, the front page of The Virtual Wall has 32 graphics, so one person viewing only that page would count as 33 hits. If that person came back to the front page again, that would count as another 33 hits. We don't report hits because that would be very misleading. You can view the number of unique visitors who visit The Virtual Wall and other web sites on an independent web site.

Why don't you have memorials to ALL the casualties of the war on The Virtual Wall? We intend The Virtual Wall to be like the letters, photographs and other personal items left at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial ... a place for relatives or friends to leave personal memorials. The Virtual Wall therefore only has memorials if someone with a personal relationship with the casualty requests a memorial and provides some personal content. Otherwise the memorials would not have a personal nature. It would be much easier for us to write a program that would spit out database information about every casualty, but those wouldn't be personal memorials.

Why did you "decline " to make the memorial pages I requested? We have declined to publish text from persons with misdirected anti-war sentiment who tried to insult the fallen by blaming them for the war. We insist on a truly personal connection between the requestor and the person memorialized. Being a relative, a friend, a friend of a relative, or having worn a POW/MIA bracelet qualify as a personal connection. We have had to declined requests like "please make memorials to all the casualties from Southern California", "make memorials to everybody with the same last name as mine", and "make memorials to everybody who died in Tay Ninh Province."

Do you edit remembrances? We certainly do. The Virtual Wall is a publication, not a wild anything-goes blog. We correct spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and gramatical errors when we find them. We also edit photographs to crop, resize, remove noise, and adjust the color balance. 

Does this organization run the Traveling Wall? We have very close relations with The Moving Wall but we have separate organizations. The Moving Wall opened in 1984.

Where did the idea for The Virtual Wall come from? In 1996 the Vietnam Veterans Home Page and the web site of Friends of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial both had a small collection of memorial web pages. In March, 1997 the founders of those organizations, and some vets who are National Park Service volunteers at the Wall decided to have a web site dedicated solely to memorial pages. 

How has The Virtual Wall been funded? For our first four years, internet services were generously provided free by Integration, Incorporated of Batavia, New York. Failing health caused the owner to sell the business. Since then, costs have come out of the pockets of three volunteers. We have sent checks back to several generous persons. We plan to someday apply to acquire IRS 501(c)3 not-for-profit status. After that status is achieved, we plan to accept donations to help us defray our costs.

Have you thought of accepting advertising to make money? We have had several offers of money in exchange for links, icons, and outright commercials. To many of us who have lost friends or relatives in the war, commercializing their sacrifices would be like making the Wall in Washington into a billboard.

How about having music on The Virtual Wall? We considered and tried patriotic or remembrance music on memorial pages. There are currently too many problems with sounds on web pages, including slow download times and incompatibilities that can crash browser programs or the anoying message "you can't view this page until you install a specific multimedia driver." When we first opened The Virtual Wall in 1997, we announced we would accept voice recordings of memorials but too many technical problems have prevented reaching that goal.