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Most students walk by the wooded area east of All Faiths Chapel while barely noticing the circular Vietnam Memorial. The 20-foot-diameter memorial, made from the familiar limestone, recognizes more than 40 K-State students who were either missing or killed in action in Vietnam or Southeast Asia from 1959-75.
The $20,000 memorial was dedicated in 1989 to the several hundred Vietnam veterans who attended K-State, including then-governor Mike Hayden. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, Vernon Walters, was the guest speaker.
The memorial - from the planning to its completion - was almost solely organized by K-State. A K-State graduate submitted the winning design and a student contracting group was responsible for most of the construction.
The memorial was originally planned to be built north of Nichols Hall, but the location was moved to its current area to account for its "more contemplative" attitude.
Before the memorial's construction, the only recognition of Vietnam veterans was a plaque in the K-State Student Union. Bill Arck, head of the Vietnam Memorial Planning Committee during its construction, told the K-Stater alumni magazine the memorial was more fitting because the more than 40 students listed on the memorial "walked the campus every day just like you and me. Then they, because of the war, they were gone."
When the memorial was built, there was some debate in the Student Senate as to whether the memorial should remember the deaths of the soldiers or be an anti-war memorial. A large majority of senators voted to make it a traditional memorial to the soldiers.
During the Vietnam War, male students at K-State would huddle around televisions every week to find out if their draft numbers were called.
Though students in college received a deferment from the draft, several hundred K-State students served in the conflict.
- University Archives and Manuscripts
