I went to the Vietnam war Memorial last night.

Many war monuments celebrate how awesome we are and how great our victory was. Like some sort of celebration of the horrors of war.

Not this one.

It makes the death individual and unique, and thus all the more horrible and wasteful. It sits quietly in the Mall, where it draws you down into it. And, sad to say, it’s much bigger than I had pictured it in my mind. I went at night and the lighting on the memorial, which my camera couldn’t capture, made it so heavy and grave. I nearly cried. It deabstractifies (I heard the president say that) the death caused by war. It was quite powerful.