Book Chronicles Arlington National Cemetery

Read the Full Transcript

• JUDY WOODRUFF:

  Finally this Memorial Day, "Where Valor Rests," that's the title of a new book about Arlington National Cemetery, as chronicled by a group of professional photographers, both civilian and military. Recently, we talked with some of the book's contributors.

  RICK ATKINSON, Journalist and Author: Arlington is one of those places in America that means something to everyone who comes here. You have, any time of the year, any day of the year, a mixture of the living and dead mingling with one another.

  I'm Rick Atkinson. I'm an author, and I wrote the forward to "Where Valor Rests."

  This has long been a liminal place, a threshold where the living meet the dead and where national history is intertwined with personal loss. Yet Arlington also is a shrine to valor and sacrifice, to service and fidelity.

  Those interred here tell a story, not just of the republic in war and in peace, but also of a transcendent ideal, conceived in liberty and re-consecrated in every new grave dug, every benediction murmured, every commitment into the hollowed ground. In this city of the dead, it is an ideal that lives on.

• BRUCE DALE, Photographer:

  I've never been here, whether bright sunlight, morning, noon, night, rain, or snow, and it always has kind of a special quality. My name is Bruce Dale. I was invited to be a contributing photographer for this book.

  You're showing permanence. You're showing both beauty and sadness at the same time, and I think that's what this place means to me. I used one of my specially modified cameras that captures images by light that's totally invisible to the human eye. It produces a black-and-white image that has sort of an ethereal look. It sort of — it glows a little bit. It turns chlorophyll white and skies almost black. And to me, it sort of gave a ghostly look that I thought kind of was appropriate to use in an area like this, with all the souls that are departed.

  One of my favorite pictures, a picture that's on the far left, you see the Washington Monument, and then, if you look down near middle foreground, you see a caisson and the horses, and the honor guard is over there. And as it swings around to the right, there's the Pentagon, and then it seems to be a sea, like just an ocean of tombstones, that seem to go onto infinity.

  And on the far right, as luck would have it, by total serendipity, somebody wandered into the scene, and I talked to him later. He stopped to visit his parents who were buried there.