A tourist in the nation’s capital – Day 2 (part 2)

Lincoln Memorial 

This is one of the most easily recognizable monuments in Washington, DC. It graces the back of our $5 bill and sits directly across the Reflecting Pool from the Washington Monument. Everybody knows what it looks like.

From the outside, especially from the bottom of the steps, this is another imposing marble edifice. I like that the names of the states carved into the frieze above the colonnade. I first saw these names on the back of a $5 bill when I was in grade school. Kinda cool to see that they’re also present in the real thing.

Inside the memorial has a very different feel. There’s the famous sculpture of Lincoln sitting on that big chair, of course, with his various writings carved into the walls around him. But even though that statue is so dang big, it doesn’t feel cold or distancing. Lincoln looks like he’s just a person. Viewed from ground level the statue’s hands and feet are enormous compared to the head; I don’t know if the sculptor did that deliberately, or if it’s just an artifact of perspective because we’re looking up at it.

I’m strongly drawn to the hands of this sculpture. Neither of them indicates a relaxed posture; the fingers of the right hand are gripping the armrest of the chair, and the left hand is closed in a fist. I don’t know what those hands are intended to convey, but to me they suggest tension.

Isn’t that slightly raised right index finger interesting? I wonder if that was an actual mannerism of Lincoln’s, or just an artistic decision made by the sculptor.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is, of course, among those writings inscribed on the wall of the memorial. For some reason I’d assumed that the bit we all know was the beginning of a much longer speech. But no, the entire thing is contained in this single panel. Simple and eloquent. Why the heck do politicians talk so dang much today? And why do they so often seem to say so little?

Vietnam Veterans Memorial  I knew what the Vietnam Memorial was going to look like, having seen plenty of pictures and followed from afar the design and construction of it. And everyone I knew who had seen it raved at how touching it is. The one thing that pictures and words cannot convey is what it feels like to walk by the wall. Getting to the wall from the Lincoln Memorial you walk past a monument to the U.S. soldiers who fought in Vietnam.

It’s slightly larger than life-size and the details are amazing. From the expressions on their faces these men are exhausted and yet resolved. I wish we’d had more time so I could take pictures of this piece from different angles.

The Vietnam Wall is shaped like a long, meandering trapezoid. Like the FDR Memorial, this is one that you don’t just approach and leave; the path takes you along the entire length of the Wall. The panels on each end taper up towards the panels in the middle. This is visually pleasing, but the effect results from the fact that each panel bears the names of the soldiers who died in a given year of the war, and so the overall shape of the wall is a long, tapered trapezoid. I didn’t have the right equipment to get all or even any significant portion of the Wall in a photograph, so I didn’t even try.

You might not expect a simple list of names to be so moving. I certainly didn’t. And while this listing might seem like a way of making the names anonymous, it had the opposite effect. I don’t have a relative whose name is on the Wall so none of the names here meant anything to me personally. But when you are confronted with the sheer magnitude of the mortality and the (mostly) young people who were lost to their families, it’s very sobering.

Note that there are no ranks among the names. Each name on the wall represents a person who served and died, and military ranks don’t matter to the dead. Nobody gets special treatment in this memorial.

Slightly off the beaten path and therefore not heavily visited is the Vietnam Women’s Monument. There are only eight women’s names on the Wall, but there were ~11,000 women who served in Vietnam, mostly as nurses. The Vietnam Women’s Monument recognizes the skills of these women as they tend to a wounded soldier.

The blue cards on the base of the monument are thank-you notes written by schoolchildren in Kansas. They said things like “Thank you for serving your country” and “I wish I had your courage.” Smart kids.