I stopped at the Viet Nam War Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. early on a Saturday morning, just as the all-volunteer cleaning crew was finishing a scrub down of the memorial walls. After they left, I had the memorial all to myself for about 10 minutes, which is rare based on the constant stream of over 3 million visitors each year. I try and stop by a few times a year to pay my respects to some friends who are no longer with us that I served with or knew growing up. Visitors often leave sentimental items each day, which are collected, cataloged, and warehoused by the National Park Service. There were just a few sentimental items that had been left up to that point, as it was still early in the day. A few in particular caught my eye. The first was a Father’s Day letter and family snapshot from a daughter addressed to her deceased father who had been killed in action when she was very young. A second included a group of items included a U.S. Army Charlie Company 2/7 1st Cavalry Division baseball cap, uniform insignia, and a used tobacco pipe. The third item was comprised of a picture of Army Spec-4 Daniel L. Behm (KIA on January 24, 1970) accompanied by a simple red carnation. The last was a single rose that was left leaning on one of the panels. The Wall contains 58,261 names, including 8 women inscribed onto granite panels. Approximately 1,200 of these are listed as missing (MIAs, POWs, and others). As always, they may be gone from this life, but they will never be forgotten. First image is with the 20mm and the rest were the mz 9-18mm using the E-P2. PP with Aperture 3 & Nik Color & Silvr Efex plug-ins.
You are welcome, but you are the one who puts in the time and effort for the POW/MIA cause in addition to your time here. I really have no excuse for not visiting regularly, as I only live a few clicks south of the mall.
Certainly very moving images. From a purely social photography point of view, the 3rd one feels the more "real" and personal. This pipe screams of a man we don't know, and yet the message is only intelligible by him and he's no longer there to explain. Sad.
