 So the make your way around the outside and then the inside on the inside. There are reliefs that portray Different facets of You know going to war there's you know from the bombing offensive over Europe to the home front And interestingly, you know everything is covered and again I think it was to the the goal was to be really inclusive And to try to make sure that everyone's war experience was represented in some way. There are two Easter eggs there there's a little surprising piece of Graffiti if you look for you can find it that is the one thing that breaks the very somber You know classical Architecture you've got reeds you've got eagles You've got you know Very somber looking white marble plinths. There's two pieces of graffiti that are hard to find but that are much more about Are they in the brochure? That's cheating But they're they're much more reflective of the the soldiers experience And then the other thing to check is once you've gotten down into the lower level is the the field of gold stars Which is an interesting? Kind of borrows a little bit from the Vietnam wall, but there were about 56,000 deaths in Vietnam There were more than 400,000 deaths in the Second World War So you're obviously not possible to put every name on the World War two Memorial and so they did instead as you can see it from here. It's sort of directly behind me There is a fountain with a gold star for every 500 deaths so each star Represents 500 people who lost their lives fighting the Second World War To me it has a really interesting effect and when I'm here. I often hang out by the fountain To listen to tourist response and one of the ones I hear the most is is my first response Which is that's not as many stars as I thought like 400,000 is a huge amount of loss of life and sacrifice and each each one represents 500 families who are missing a son or a father or brother But for some reason the number 500 Divides it in and you're like it doesn't seem like as much as I would have thought which I think is exactly the Opposite of the intention they wanted to have so I don't know exactly how they made that judgment But you might want to walk down and and see what response You get to that As a historian, I've always thought it's just weird to have it organized by the states It's very interesting to me now when I come back and visit and I'll watch people interacting with it especially World War two veterans make a beeline right for their home state And there will often be World War two veterans Standing around acting as interpreters and they'll they'll be wearing their uniforms and they often will you know ask if you'd like to To hear a little from them and they go right for their home states, too So on some level it's worked a lot just to me it it doesn't It just doesn't resonate because that's one category that Didn't organize the war in any way it would be like, you know Monument that said this part of the monument is for guys from five foot 0 to 5 foot 3 in this part of the monument is from 5 foot 3 to 5.6 and it just it doesn't it doesn't really say much The other question be asking yourself is who is this for? It was sort of you know, it was expedited in Congress and the fundraising in the construction The thought that it was very important to have something memorializing the the sacrifice of The veterans generation while some of them were still alive That's not always the the reason we commemorate things, you know memorials go up for different reasons And the Vietnam Memorial is a really good example because there's a memorial that at first The most vocal opponents were Vietnam veterans themselves who said we do not want that that does not represent us And in the 1980s they said well, it's not just about you it's about the whole country's experience in Vietnam And the way it affected everyone besides just the people who fought and you know, you can think about which parts of this are are for Servicemen and women which parts are for their families which parts are for just regular Americans What part of it is teaching? Which is a useful tool that monuments do and which part is just commemoration or celebration? but the most interesting way I think to look at this is in conjunction with the Vietnam Memorial and the Korean Memorial, which is another interesting outlier And those of you who've seen that it's like a large field of slightly larger than life figures But the real tone there is realism it is not a sort of Idealized version of the war which you often see especially like civil war monuments when you're driving around DC You'll see the guy on horseback, and he's got the gleaming gold braid and the horses rearing back And they look larger than life the Korean War these guys are slogging across a field They're in their winter gear, and they look tired You can see the weight hanging in their shoulders. They're humping pieces of gear. Some of them have you know mortar tubes and and Machine guns slung across their shoulders, and you can see the fatigue in their faces You can see the exhaustion in their bodies, and that's a really different kind of portrayal There isn't that level of realism here. There isn't that level of representation I don't think they're trying to have that here so you know different Different memorials that are all talking about the same basic thing Which is what is it? What does this country do when it goes to war still have really different designs? And you can learn a lot about where the country was at the time the memorial was being designed and built by taking a close look at What it looks like and thinking about how it might have looked different