By the autumn of 2005, the white chapel on the hill above Angel Fire was already thirty-four years old, and thousands of visitors a year were finding their way up U.S. Highway 64 to sit in its quiet. Then, on Veterans Day 2005, the memorial entered a new chapter. The site became Vietnam Veterans Memorial State Park, New Mexico's thirty-third state park, and the only state park in the United States dedicated solely to Vietnam veterans.
Click to see more photos of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial — the chapel, the Huey helicopter, the gardens, and the memorial bricks
The road to that day began in grief. Dr. Victor Westphall and his wife Jeanne began building the Vietnam Veterans Peace and Brotherhood Chapel in 1968, after their son, Marine First Lieutenant Victor David Westphall III, was killed near Con Thien, South Vietnam, on May 22, 1968. The chapel was dedicated on May 22, 1971, the third anniversary of David's death, and it was the first major memorial created to honor the veterans of the Vietnam War. In 1982 the Disabled American Veterans assumed ownership, purchased an additional twenty-five acres, and built the Westphall Visitor Center, which was dedicated in May 1986. Congress recognized the memorial as a memorial of national significance in 1987, and in 1988 Jeanne and Doc Westphall founded the David Westphall Veterans Foundation to support it. Ownership returned to the foundation from the DAV in 1998.
By then, keeping the hilltop going on donations alone had become a heavy lift, and the founders themselves were gone. Doc Westphall died in 2003 and Jeanne followed in 2004, and the two are buried on the memorial grounds they built. In 2004 the foundation approached the State of New Mexico and Governor Bill Richardson about preserving the memorial for the long term. The foundation donated the memorial and the thirty acres around it to the state, and the state agreed to repair and maintain the infrastructure, spending approximately 2.6 million dollars on the renovation that followed.
Visitors today still walk through what the state park years built. The amphitheater behind the chapel, completed in 2007, hosts veterans programs throughout the year, and the state parks updated the Visitor Center, with its museum exhibits, library, and film room. Through all of it, two promises from the transfer held firm: the memorial remained the only New Mexico state park that does not charge an admission fee, and the chapel itself stayed open twenty-four hours a day, exactly as it had been since the Westphalls' time.
The state park name lasted a little more than a decade. In July 2017, the memorial was transferred from New Mexico State Parks to the New Mexico Department of Veterans Services, which operates it today, and the David Westphall Veterans Foundation remains at its side, running the gift shop, collecting photographs and biographies of those killed in Vietnam, and administering the memorial brick walkway program. The name on the signs has changed more than once since 1971, but the purpose the Westphalls set on that hill has not: a free, always-open place of reunion, reflection, and healing above the Moreno Valley.