Pentagon Memorial and Air Force Memorial

Wow! Where has the time gone? Has it really been almost three whole weeks since I last posted? I was out of town for a couple of those weeks with very limited access to the internet and will try to catch up a bit at a time.

A few days before leaving, Rich and I went to see the Pentagon Memorial and the Air Force Memorial.

We rode the Metro to the Pentagon stop and walked around two faces of the building to the memorial site. The memorial sits on approximately 2 acres about 200 ft from where Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. You can read all the details of the memorial at the link above so I won't describe it all here. We were there on a muggy Sunday morning and there were easily a couple of hundred people there. It definitely has a very somber feeling about it. I don't know if that's because of the newness (It was just dedicated on September 11, 2008), or if because the events are in our recent memory. But even though it's in a large open area, there is a lot of nearby traffic noise, and you hear a lot of gravel crunching sounds, people spoke in very hushed tones if at all. It was unsettling to see a couple hundred people in a large open area and not hear talking.

The benches each rise up over a small glowing pool of water. Because we were there in the daytime we didn't see it all lit up. I'd like to go back sometime and see it in the evening. Maybe when we have some visitors. That really goes for almost all of the monuments and memorials here in the area. They look very different lit up at night. You almost have to see them both ways to fully appreciate them.

From the Pentagon Memorial, we walked 1/2 mile (uphill!) to the Air Force Memorial. As I mentioned in an earlier post , the spires of the memorial are visible from my apartment building. Well, they're visible from a lot of places in the Northern Virginia/DC Metro area, but when I first saw them from the roof of our apartment building I had no idea what they were. Once I found out from my brother Bob (thanks Bob!) that they were part of the Air Force Memorial it made so much sense. Have you ever seen the USAF Thunderbirds perform? The memorial looks very much like the "bomb burst" maneuver that they do.

The spires are just a part of the memorial. At the entrance are bronze Honor Guard statues. They are larger than lifesize. My pic isn't the best with the sun behind them. There are granite inscription walls located at either end. There is also a Glass Contemplation Wall that honors fallen airmen. It was impossible to get a good picture because of the glare of the sun. Maybe at a different time of day.

We walked back to the Metro and made it home just as it started pouring.