CROSSING THE POTOMAC: WASHINGTON

CROSSING THE POTOMAC: WASHINGTON FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE RIVER Story and photography by Margaret & Eric Anderson The cherry blossom rush is past, the humid summer has not begun. Now is a great time to visit our nation's capital and maybe analyze, after 9/11, who we are and what we stand for. And perhaps consider all those who've made a sacrifice in our name in the past and for whom a stone monument may not be enough unless we think about them afresh and honor them in our minds.

We'll see plenty of evidence of those who have put us in their debt. The statues are all over DC and Arlington, Virginia. Your camera will be as busy as your conscience. "Our country's capital with its monuments and memorials is one of the most photogenic cities in the world," says E. David Luria, a professional photographer who takes tourists on photo safaris around Washington, DC. "No matter what's happening inside its walls, it looks like a magnificent capital city and it photographs that way." Though cameras click on the other side of the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, most photographs are taken around the area that stretches west from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. These pictures are the recognizable photos that signify DC to the nation.
	The recent monuments, the Korea and Vietnam memorials, are especially poignant as those wars happened in our time. The Korean War Veterans Memorial, built at a cost of $18 million in donated funds, is located on a 2.2-acre site adjacent to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It shows a patrol of 19 soldiers advancing ready for combat with the American flag as their symbolic objective. A 164-foot mural wall is inscribed with the words, Freedom Is Not Free and is etched with 2,500 photographic images of nurses, chaplains and other support personnel that symbolize the vast effort that sustains the military operation. On a granite flagstone is etched text which, perhaps unwittingly, shows the futility of war. It reads: "The nation honors her sons and daughters who answered the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met."



	If that doesn't hurt it's just a few steps to the Vietnam Wall. The black granite walls of this moving V-shaped Vietnam memorial are inscribed with the names of the 58,209 Americans missing or killed in the Vietnam conflict. Even today families grieve at the wall: a woman rubs a sister's name on to paper, a mother tries so hard to touch her son's name. Apparently H. Ross Perot felt the wall did not pay enough tribute to the fallen so he commissioned, at his own expense Frederick Hart to create a life-size bronze sculpture depicting three young servicemen gazing sadly at the wall before them as if contemplating the names of friends and buddies who weren't as lucky as they were.