COMMENTARY : More Is <i> Not </i> Better : The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has served America well, both as an exalted monument and a triumph of modern design. Why then, an art critic laments, is its original apolitical message being eroded by kitschy additions?

Located on a gently rolling stretch of the National Mall in Washington, an imperial city filled with extraordinary sights, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is as essential a place to visit as the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial, between which it gracefully unfolds. Few Americans would dispute that today; 11 years after it was erected, this gravely beautiful work of art ranks as the single greatest monument to have been designed in our time.

Its two walls of highly polished black granite reach out into the earth in a wide V shape, about 450 feet long, creating a sense of gentle enclosure for private contemplation within a communal public space. A deeply personal sense of connectedness is evidenced by the common sight of a note folded and tucked into its crevices, flowers laid at its base, a photograph propped against its granite face. With its chiseled list of the names of American servicemen and servicewomen who died in Vietnam, the walls are intimately known to countless people.

Sadly, however, this exalted monument is undergoing significant erosion. Despite the special place the Vietnam Memorial occupies in the hearts of most all who have visited the site, and despite its grand significance in the annals of modern design, the meaning of the memorial is quietly being altered.

Originally, the monument’s design respectfully directed your thoughts to the complex nature of military sacrifice, marked by the awesome mix of excruciating pain and humble pride. It took no position on the appropriateness of the war, because Vietnam endures as the most divisive international conflict in the nation’s history.

Some vigorous supporters of the war, however, have never been satisfied with such a monument. They have always believed it should send a specific message. Specifically, they want the memorial to declare from the heart of official Washington that the Vietnam War was a good and noble cause.

Efforts to accomplish this goal began even before the wall was built--before the moving power of its deceptively simple design had been experienced, before it was embraced by the American people as a place like no other. Certain “additions” were proposed almost from the moment the design was unveiled in 1981, additions that eventually came to be incorporated into the plan.

On Nov. 11--Veteran’s Day--another, even newer modification of the great design will be dedicated. This one elaborates on the central feature of the earlier alteration.

Like the first big change, the second calls for the addition of a bronze statue to the site. Joining a 1984 sculpture of three battle-weary male soldiers dressed in fatigues, which was fashioned by Washington-based sculptor Frederick Hart, a bronze depiction commemorating American servicewomen will soon be erected nearby, down a leafy path about 150 feet from the wall. This figural grouping, sculpted by Santa Fe, N.M.-based artist Glenna Goodacre, has as its centerpiece a female nurse caring for a wounded male soldier; behind them, a second woman anxiously searches the sky, perhaps for a medical evacuation helicopter, while a third woman pensively kneels at the back.

This monument to women’s heroism was conceived in direct response to the addition of Hart’s earlier statue. About 11,000 American women served in Vietnam, yet Hart’s heroic image depicted only men. Women’s numbers were small compared to male combatants, but they nonetheless served selflessly (none were drafted) and often with valor, mostly in the health professions.

Many female veterans were rightly angered by their exclusion and invisibility. Thus was born the privately funded Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project, which commissioned its own statue to remedy the perceived mistake. Years were spent navigating the course of congressional approval, selecting an artist and casting a statue, for a tab of $4 million.

Ironically, Goodacre’s design, commissioned to right a wrong, turned out to share something fundamental with Hart’s. Both are works of monumental kitsch, fashioned by artists of meager talents. And both do damage to the great memorial.

His figures amount to big toy soldiers, effectively reducing the National Mall to a back-yard playground where war games imagined by little boys are acted out on the grass. Three bronze soldiers, slightly larger than life-size, stand in a mildly aggressive wedge formation, proud, cautious, ever at the ready. The alert figures seem on guard for sudden shelling or sniper fire--which, it would seem, might erupt at any moment from behind the Lincoln Memorial.

Hers will be equally absurd, based on a review of photographs of the sculpture, for it offers as moving insight a cornball recitation of a wheezy artistic cliche. The pretentious central figure of a nurse seated on a pile of sandbags, cradling in her arms a wounded male soldier lying horizontally across her lap, is very familiar in the annals of Western art. The composition is plainly meant to recall Renaissance depictions of the lamentation of the Virgin Mary over the dead body of Christ.

Formally, Goodacre is no Michelangelo. Her crude modeling skills are unequipped to compete with the Vatican’s virtuoso Pieta. But self-indulgent fantasies of artistic ego are only a minor problem here.

The major worry is the saintly, even godlike ethos of the sculptural ensemble. With its transcendent iconography of human mortality and spiritual salvation, the statue casts a false light of sanctity over an inescapably conflicted event. The presumptuous image of a Vietnam Pieta is hardly representative of so discordant an episode in America’s history. Doubts about the war are erased by its coarsely inappropriate visual overture, which conjures sentiments of “Onward, Christian Soldier.”

Together with the earlier bronze, the statue subtly ascribes a new and official meaning to the war being commemorated--and it’s a bleak and troubling change. The Vietnam Memorial is being framed by a distinct political posture of moral goodness, which was blessedly absent from the original design. Indeed, the absence of any posturing--pro or con--is a pivotal reason for the brilliant success of the existing memorial.

The extreme polarization of opinion over Vietnam pitted American against American. Everyone chose sides--to a recalcitrant degree unheard of in the United States since the Civil War. Just about the last thing a truly commemorative monument could endure was a political point of view that indulged one side over the other, either opposed to or in favor of American military involvement in Southeast Asia.

The genius of the original monument was that it simply refused the divisive choice. Architect Maya Lin was a student at Yale when her design was selected by an eight-member jury from among 1,420 submissions to an open competition. Her contemplative plan was simple, almost stark, focusing on a chronological listing, etched into granite walls, of the names of 57,692 Americans (eight of them women) who had died in Vietnam between July, 1959, and May, 1975.

Regardless of one’s political position on the war, the reality of the body bag was the inescapable center of Vietnam. With graceful compassion, Lin’s abstract design looked that reality in the eye. She carved out a secular but spiritual space for sober, loving reflection.

It wasn’t that her proposal was apolitical. No work of art, least of all one commissioned for the state as an official commemoration in the nation’s capital, can escape politics. But the peaceful, gently sheltering space she envisioned was a firmly voiced declaration that an authentic memorial is sacred soil--which is to say, no place for grandstanding of any kind, whether heroic or recriminatory, extolling patriotic fervor or principled dissent.

People might argue endlessly and passionately whether those who served in Vietnam were heroes or victims. But not here, not in this place, not before a list of names consecrated with human blood. This was a public place for private thoughts and individual reconciliation, regardless of one’s political position for or against the war. The abstractness of the monument’s design, and its mirrorlike surface that reflected your face in the rows of names, allowed all visitors to bring whatever political viewpoint they wished to their remembrance of the dead.

When Lin’s design was chosen in May, 1981, the war had been over for nearly six years. Deep wounds in the nation’s psyche, as profound as any physically engendered by the conflict, remained painfully raw and exposed. A small but vocal chorus of detractors began to emerge. Within six months, their complaints had risen to a din.

For some fervent supporters of American military involvement in Vietnam, the simple absence from the monument of an assertive endorsement of the war’s moral rightness was considered an affront. Perhaps conditioned by the habitually polarized sentiments that marked the war years, they could only perceive the absence as an anti-war statement.

The absence was in fact no such thing, as even conservative columnist--and enthusiastic supporter of the war--James J. Kilpatrick understood and duly noted. He wrote several perceptive columns lavishing praise on Maya Lin’s design.

Still, it was 1981. “Morning in America.” Buoyed by the suddenly rising tide of the Reagan Revolution, some saw a chance to claim the memory of Vietnam in the name of a particular politics. An onrush of bizarre interpretations and ludicrous charges about the proposed memorial issued forth, all calculated to sink the plan.

The V shape of the granite wall was earnestly claimed to be a covert allusion to the splayed fingers flashed as a peace sign by anti-war protesters. Its black color, simply necessary to create a mirrorlike surface, was declared a symbol of shame.

Cold Warriors rattled the usual sabers. Columnist Patrick J. Buchanan penned a zealous denunciation, in which he ominously charged that a member of the selection jury had longstanding ties to the American Communist Party. Tom Wolfe, the novelist and well-known hater of modern art and design, wrote a lengthy rant in which he condemned the choice of a monument that was abstract, rather than figurative. Going abstract, Wolfe elaborately fumed, was “symbolic of a Red Guard-style cultural revolution.”

William F. Buckley’s conservative journal, the National Review, vigorously objected to the plan. So did conservative Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), who tried to abort the entire project. He described the design as “a political statement of shame and dishonor” in a letter circulated to Congress and sent to President Reagan.

And then there was Ross Perot. The Dallas businessman, who had supported the war, had also been an early backer of a memorial to Vietnam veterans. He had given $160,000 to underwrite the competition to choose a design. But when Lin’s winning plan was duly announced, he derisively described the granite wall as “a tombstone” and “an apology, not a memorial.”

Perot, an avid collector of sunshiny, anecdotal paintings by American illustrator Norman Rockwell, tried to get her project stopped. It has been alleged--and the Washington Post has reported considerable evidence--that he was behind the hiring of Roy M. Cohn, the infamous lawyer and former redbaiting aide to the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, who inexplicably began to harass the memorial committee. Fiscal irregularities were charged and an audit demanded of the privately funded project.

Perot has denied involvement in Cohn’s activity. (In any case, a 1984 report by the General Accounting Office gave the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund a clean bill of health.) But the self-styled tribune of the people also commissioned one of his famous public opinion polls, in hopes of tapping populist ire. Of the 587 returned POWs who were asked, however, more than half did not respond; only one-third replied that they didn’t like Lin’s design.

Unrecorded is whether any of those 178 dissenters changed their minds, when the finished monument was unveiled--or, for that matter, whether Buchanan, Wolfe, Buckley, Hyde or Perot did, either. By 1982, however, when it became clear to Perot’s contingent that the plan would not be scrapped, dramatic changes in Lin’s design were sought.

With the help of James G. Watt, Reagan’s secretary of the Interior, and Republican Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, Frederick Hart’s bronze sculpture of alert soldiers was commissioned and added to the plan. So was a huge flagpole, proposed for the vertex of the V, which would effectively transform the granite walls below into a pedestal for Old Glory.

Billed as a healing compromise, the scheme in fact completely trashed the original design. At the insistence of Washington’s Fine Arts Commission, the flagpole scheme was eventually altered. With the Hart sculpture, it was moved to an entry area 50 yards away from the monument proper, where they stand today. There they retain an awkward, ancillary feeling. Who even remembers the lumpen sculpture with any emotional specificity, after encountering the gut-wrenching wall?

Still, the effect of the statue’s presence within the memorial site should not be minimized--especially as it will soon be joined by Heroizing Statue No. 2. The way in which the “women’s bronze” was meant to correct the error of the “men’s bronze” shows how political posturing merely keeps the wound of Vietnam an open sore.

Festering resentments might now erupt in the face of other perceived inequities. For example: Like Hart’s hopelessly vulgar statue, Goodacre’s casts its one black female soldier in the role of faithful sidekick--Tonto to the white Lone Ranger, who is the centerpiece of the heroic action. Given the disproportionate number of African-Americans who served in Vietnam--a war fought principally by soldiers drawn from among the poor and lower middle classes--the stereotypical casting is repugnant.

Politically motivated works of art always invite arguments, and when arguments get stirred up in the vicinity of Vietnam, the lives of dead Americans become mere fodder to be fed to the cannons of your political viewpoint. Lin’s design was remarkable because it actually set aside divisive quarrels over the nobility of the cause. The accumulating alterations in bronze, however, demand taking sides.

In the process they are sealing an awful fate, which makes a mockery of the truth of Vietnam. For it doesn’t matter on which side of the argument you stood--or stand. Slowly, ineluctably, the site is being transformed into a memorial to just another splendid war.