Tysons Corner ad shocks Vietnam vets
By: Michael Neibauer
Examiner Staff Writer
June 9, 2009
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| Photo courtesy of Dave Stroup. |
Prominent Vietnam veterans and their families are appalled by an advertisement for a major local mall that shows a woman in front of a wall that strongly resembles the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with the names of the center’s stores appearing instead of the names of the war dead.
Tysons Corner Center reacted quickly to condemnation from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund and ordered the immediate removal of 440 of the ads from the Metrorail cars where they have been posted, mall spokeswoman Allison Fischer said Tuesday afternoon.
The Tysons ad features a black granite wall engraved with a list of shops over the slogan, “It’s time to defrost.” The store names are presented in virtually the same font on a highly reflective surface like the Vietnam Memorial. There is an image in the background of a what could be a rose, a flower commonly left at the Wall.
“There’s no question my generation will see this as The Wall,” said Marshall Carter, chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and a veteran of two tours in Vietnam. “There’s no getting around it. It jumps right off the page.”
Jan Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund, said the ad is an “obvious and blatant misuse of the image of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which has a serious place in America's heart and soul.” More than 58,000 American men and women died in the war.
“There is nothing clever about this ad,” Scruggs said. “It is, rather, both distasteful and disgusting.”
The poster was spotted on an afternoon Red Line train and photographed by Dave Stroup, who writes for the blog Why I Hate DC. Metro spokeswoman Lisa Farbstein said Tysons paid $56,000 for a one-month run of the so-called “rail car card.”
“We honor the First Amendment, just like most newspapers do,” Farbstein told The Examiner before the mall said it would have the ads removed. “It’s a freedom of speech issue.”
In a statement, Fischer said Tysons holds “nothing but the greatest respect for the men and women who have served this country and we apologize to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund for any unintentional similarities” to the Wall.
“We are responding to the Fund's request and are moving quickly to remove this advertisement,” she said. “The ad design, which was developed as an evolution of the long-standing Tysons Corner Center campaign ‘Where the Stores are,’ was not intended to emulate any representation of the Memorial Wall.”
Veterans, however, were horrified.
“That the Wall be exploited for a buck is hateful,” Retired Rear Admiral George Worthington said in an e-mail. “I'd even suggest boycotting Tyson's Corner stores; they don't sell anything you can't buy at another mall.”
J. M. Martin, a disabled Vietnam Veteran, said the “tasteless” ad offends those who served and dishonors those who died. It is analogous, he said, “to having a family’s gravestone depicted as commercial advertisement.” Pascual Goicoechea, chief of operations at Ft. Bragg in North Carolina, called the ad a “Madison Avenue flop.”
