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Photo: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Tristan Miller, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Often described as the most moving memorial in the city, the Vietnam Memorial stands as tribute to those who died or went missing, intended to transcend political controversy in remembrance of the soldiers who gave the ultimate sacrifice. Its centerpiece is a simple black granite wall engraved with the 58,256 names of each.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, commonly called the Vietnam Memorial, is a U.S. national memorial in Washington, D.C., honoring service members of the United States Armed Forces who served in the Vietnam War. The two-acre (8,100 m2) site is dominated by two black granite walls engraved with the names of those service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia during the war. The Memorial Wall was designed by American architect Maya Lin and is an example of minimalist architecture. The Wall, completed in 1982, has since been supplemented with the statue Three Soldiers in 1984 and the Vietnam Women's Memorial in 1993.
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Most of the D.C. memorials, especially those for U.S. leaders, are meant to awe and impress in a very direct manner. None more so than this impressive monument in a commanding location at the end of the Mall. Modeled after the Greek Temple of Zeus, Lincoln sits with a commanding presence overlooking the reflecting pool, straight across the Mall to the Washington Monument and beyond it the Capitol Building. Few monuments in the world can match the simple power of the Lincoln Memorial at night.
The view from the Lincoln Memorial, with the 2,000 ft Reflecting Pool in the foreground and the Washington Monument just behind, and the Capitol Building in the distance, is famous and not to be missed. This was the setting for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech, which he gave from the steps of the memorial over a crowd of 200,000 that didn't fit very well—many of them stood in the pool itself!
This memorial is a little hidden in the woods, and perhaps that's appropriate for the memorial to the one major war of the twentieth century (in which over 200,000 allied troops were killed or wounded) that did not leave such a huge impression in the American mind—the Forgotten War. It's easily one of the city's most powerful, though. The focus of the monument is the nineteen very realistic steel statues of American soldiers moving across the landscape (nineteen, because they total 38—referring to the 38th parallel—when reflected in the water). The lighting at night leaves an especially disconcerting, ghostly impression. The best time to visit might be after a winter snow storm, which will help you remember the worst hardship of the war—the snowy marches through the cruel Siberian winds.
A little known memorial stands on the island in the Constitution Gardens Lake, dedicated to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Not content to reside only on the document itself, their signatures have been reproduced here, etched in large granite blocks.
The Mall's only local memorial, and the only memorial to WWI, is this small secluded structure in the form of a Doric-style open-air temple serving as tribute to the 26,000 Washingtonians who served in the Great War. You'll find here the names of the 499 who died engraved at the memorial's base. Recent attempts to re-dedicate the memorial as a national WWI memorial have ironically sparked fierce Washingtonian pride in the monument—the only local monument on the Mall, with locals seeing this as just one more indignity aimed at the city by a Congress for which it cannot vote.
The newest of the Mall's memorials, dedicated to the fallen civil rights leader. You enter between two slabs of granite that symbolize a "Mountain of Despair" before standing before the "Stone of Hope", both named based on a line in King's "I Have a Dream" speech. A 30-foot likeness of King is carved out of the Stone of Hope overlooking the Tidal Basin, while a nearby wall contains inscriptions of quotes from many of King's speeches.