Images: Piedmont Park memorial plaza, sculpture now finished

The latest addition to Atlanta’s most popular park isn’t a new trail system or grand entry—it’s a large memorial that local military veterans feel the city has long lacked. 

Construction has wrapped in Piedmont Park on a large tribute sculpture, plaza, and commemorative wall called the Sons of Atlanta Vietnam War Monument and Memorial Experience. 

The installation—situated near the park’s northernmost Piedmont Avenue entrance, just west of the Active Oval—required years of fundraising and behind-the-scenes efforts but marks the City of Atlanta’s first proper tribute to local veterans of the Vietnam War who made the ultimate sacrifice, according to project leaders. 

The project recognizes 240 residents of Atlanta and Fulton County who were killed in action during the Vietnam War, according to the Sons of Atlanta organization. 

Those veterans’ names, according to a project overview, are “memorialized in the Georgia State Memorial Park across from the state capital building… in downtown Atlanta, and on the National Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington DC, but nowhere in the City of Atlanta is there a memorial with the Atlanta City Seal for these highest status patriots.”

In 2019, the Atlanta City Council adopted a resolution to establish the monument and memorial, working alongside the Atlanta Commission on Veterans Affairs and the 1118th Chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America. The Fulton County Commission followed suit later that year. 

The latter 2019 proclamation noted that Atlanta “is the only major city in the nation that doesn’t have a memorial site for those killed in the Vietnam War.” 

That’s changed now. Find more context and a closer look in the gallery above. 

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