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A controversial design honoring the lives lost in a controversial war, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial today stands as a nearly universally admired landmark. We still debate the war itself, but almost everyone agrees that Maya Lin’s graceful, abstract monument touches people in a direct and profound way. While designing the project for a class during her senior year at Yale, Lin “always thought of the individual visiting it, the one-on-one experience,” she recalled in a recent phone interview. She has been surprised, though, at how the memorial has become part of the nation’s collective consciousness, a touchstone for people of widely different backgrounds and political views.