James Reston, Jr. was an assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall before serving in the US Army from 1965 to 1968. He is the bestselling author of seventeen books—including The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews, which helped inspire the film Frost/Nixon (2008)—three plays, and numerous articles in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and the New York Times Magazine. He won the Prix Italia and Dupont-Columbus Award for his NPR radio documentary, Father Cares: The Last of Jonestown. He lives with his wife in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Jan Scruggs is a former infantry corporal who was wounded in Vietnam at age nineteen. In 1977 he became a recognized authority on what is now called Post-Traumatic Stress by publishing his graduate school research on Vietnam veterans in Military Medicine and the Washington Post and testifying before Congress. In 1979 he decided to seek a national memorial honoring the service of Vietnam veterans, engraved with the names of the fallen, on the National Mall. Scruggs had $2,800 from an inheritance. He struggled until a team of talented Vietnam veterans, some with degrees from the Harvard Business School, emerged. A plan was developed to have the memorial dedicated in November 1982. Despite extraordinary efforts to derail the project by well-funded detractors of the Maya Lin design, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was dedicated in 1982. 
 
Upon retiring in 2015, he began planning for a Global War on Terror Memorial and raised significant funding and political support to get the effort underway. He now serves in an advisory capacity. He was appointed Chairman of the Selective Service National Appeal Board by President Obama in 2012. Now semi-retired in Annapolis, he remains a member of the District of Columbia Bar Association. He enjoys public speaking and writing on topics such as the battle of Gettysburg. He can be reached at www.janscruggs.com.