 So, despite the fact that the Second World War was fought before the Vietnam War by 25 years or so, the World War II Memorial has actually started 15 years after the Vietnam Memorial. And to my eye, a big part of what the World War II Memorial is about is not being controversial. That they did not want to open a similar can of worms about how are we going to celebrate this? You know, how are we going to commemorate it? Who is it for? That it bends over backwards and goes to great lengths, not to be controversial. And in a way kind of just dilutes it to a point where it doesn't say anything controversial but I also don't know that it says all that much. People have pointed out, you know, it's very classically derived. Curiously, it actually looks like a lot of the memorials that the German architect Albert Speer built in Berlin during the Second World War as part of the Nazi government. Which is weird because it's a memorial that looks a little bit like the architecture of the country it's built to celebrate the defeat of. But you notice it's got 50-some plinths and they each have reeds. And has anybody who's seen this before noticed how the plinths are organized or what? By state. By state. By state. By state. So every state and then some of the U.S. protectorates, Guam, the Virgin Islands. So if you can, when you're standing, you can take a little closer look. But there's Wyoming, Washington, South Dakota, Nevada, Kansas, Minnesota. That's interesting as a historian in that the states really had nothing to do with the way the war was fought. In the Civil War, that was more true. People went off with the people from their home state, from their home town. But the Second World War deliberately didn't do that. They mixed people from Iowa and Florida and Alabama and Massachusetts in the same units. So it's not like the states went forward to fight. And it's not like the state governments had much of a role in the Second World War. I mean the Second World War was very much the federal government's achievement. So to organize the sort of wreath tributes, which are that big outer ring, why do you do that? It could be honoring the dead from the state. It could be. I'll buy that. Why not do it by, you know, the different military units that fought. You know, the First Division, the Second Division, the Fourth Division. I'm just underscoring that it's the United States as opposed to the... The circle, I think, does that, you know, kind of pulls it together. It sounds like they designed that committee. Yes. Which is exactly what this was. The committee was formed in the mid-1990s. There was a real push by members of Congress who were World War II veterans themselves and who said quite reasonably that this generation is not going to be around forever. We need to celebrate and commemorate their sacrifice and their achievement while they're still here to appreciate it. And then the design went through a series of committee decisions, which the Vietnam Memorial didn't. You know, the Vietnam Memorial is one person's vision. I think partly the decisions here reflect a desire to make sure that there's just nothing controversial about it. You put it in by state and there's really nothing to... That could possibly be controversial about that, because everybody came from a state or a protectorate. But at the same time, it doesn't really say much about the war. I mean, it just sort of recognizes the fact that there were, you know, four dozen entities that are there. Then you've got the big arches. One represents the European theater. One represents the Pacific theater. The two big fountains is like the Freedom Palisade. But everything is, I think, kind of homogenized in a way to make sure that it's not too controversial. There isn't much in there that would get somebody saying, this is an inaccurate way of portraying my experience. Yeah, Mara? The order of the states. Is it like... I have no idea. I have not been able to figure that out. Is it both ways? Is it like the same thing on the loop and the memorial? No, there isn't an order down there for us to... It says they alternate to the right and left of the field of stars based on when they entered the Union. The other one was the first state. Okay. So it is the order that they entered, but it goes back and forth. That's just weird. I mean, again... And for those of you who were with us this summer when we talked about the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian, that was 1995, the big brouhaha about how are you going to display the airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima? Air and Space Museum is right over there. And remember, that was a hugely controversial issue. They never wound up mounting the exhibit. There were people who had backed it, lost their jobs. And that's in the recent memory of the people who are putting this together, who I think wanted to make a memorial that could be the center where people could gather, something that was inoffensive to veterans and to the families of veterans. But as a result, I just don't think there's all that much there.