In this powerful photograph by Kevin Wolf, we see a lone figure knelt at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. The photograph was taken earlier this year, and Wolf recalls:
“It’s not staged. I just got lucky. It was an unusually foggy and weekend night, so I went out for an urban hike. I was taking a short cut through the Memorial to get to the Reflecting Pool and saw the guy walk by me. He knelt down. I saw the shot. I took it. He then walked off seconds later. The combination of the perspective/vanishing point lines, the fog, and the moment make it one of my favorites. I just saw everything come together.”
Veterans Day is an official United States holiday which honours people who have served in armed service, also known as veterans. It is a federal holiday that is observed on November 11. It coincides with other holidays such as Armistice Day (a national holiday in many WWI Allied nations) and Remembrance Day (observed in Commonwealth countries), which are celebrated in other parts of the world and also mark the anniversary of the end of World War I. (Major hostilities of World War I were formally ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, when the Armistice with Germany went into effect.) [Source]
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a national memorial in Washington, D.C. It honours U.S. service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War, service members who died in service in Vietnam/South East Asia, and those service members who were unaccounted for (Missing In Action) during the War.
The memorial currently consists of three separate parts: the Three Soldiers statue, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, which is the best-known part of the memorial. The Memorial Wall was designed by American architect Maya Lin and features over 58,195 names inscribed on the wall. [Source]