Travel Photography # 02: Vietnam War Memorial, Washington D.C.

I visited Washington, D.C. twice, first in summer 2004, and then in spring 2005. I took this photo in my second visit.

Washington, D.C. has many monuments and memorials, of which quite a few are dedicated to the nation's memories of the different wars it has been involved throughout its history. While other war memorials I have visited in D.C. are solemn and have the appropriate respectful atmosphere to the fallen soldiers of the wars, none of them could inspire in me the chilling feel of the Vietnam War Memorial.

The thousands of names inscribed on those black marble walls should remind us how cruel wars are - both to the persons whose names are written there and their families, and to those whose names are not and will never be written anywhere because they are just "too ordinary" to make it into a historical document of some sort.