Section 60 is America’s promise to honor its warriors for first serving, and then dying, in the strange dusts on foreign soil. Its 22211 ZIP code is the final address for roughly 10 percent of America’s dead from combat action in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 570 service members from Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, are “interred, inurned or memorialized with honor inside the cemetery.”  Spend time in the section and you can’t help but breathe the restless cloud of uneasiness that hangs over the calm symmetry of the graves. Your eyes lie; you actually “see” the pieces of shattered hearts and lost ambitions scattered across the manicured grounds. — Larry Downing  Larry Downing and his wife, Angelica, first visited Arlington National Cemetery together last Memorial Day. As they walked around Section 60, they saw Laura Youngblood place flowers on the gravestone of Petty Officer Third Class Travis L. Youngblood and then lie down on the ground next to it. Mr. Downing raised his point-and-shoot camera and made a single frame, just as she reached out and brushed the word “husband” with the tip of her finger.  “Then she got up and she looked at me,” Mr. Downing recalled. “I looked at her and she had this devastated look on her face. She asked me if I knew any of the people there and I said: ‘No, ma’am. I’m a veteran and I came over to pay my respects.”  Mrs. Youngblood made some introductions. “Well, this guy right here knew my husband,” she said. “And the gentleman three stones down — he also was killed on the same day my husband was killed.”  Mr. Downing told her how sorry he was. Mrs. Youngblood shrugged her shoulders. “What are you going to do?”  That day, Section 60 began to exert a pull on the Downings. They became regular visitors.  “When you walk into Section 60, you notice there are people with walls up and they don’t want to talk to you,” Mr. Downing said. “Others are like soccer moms standing on the sideline of their child’s soccer games.”  That’s what Patty Davis was like. “She came out and said, ‘Hi, how is everybody?’ And she walks up to the new mothers she knows, her new friends, very close friends and she came up and started talking to us. And that’s how we met. We chatted for probably an hour and a half.” That led to an invitation to Ms. Davis’s home.  Such personal involvement flies in the face of photojournalists’ frequent temptation to use their cameras to create walls, as Mr. Downing put it, steeling themselves against emotion. He recalled putting his guard down 15 years ago, covering the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, when he was a staff photographer at Newsweek. He had arranged, with the parents, to cover the funeral of one of the six children who had been killed.  “When they wheeled out the little two foot long white casket,” he said, “I looked at it and it took my breath away”.  Although Mr. Downing spent 10 weeks covering the Persian Gulf war in 1991, he points out that he’s never made a living as a conflict photographer. Today, he primarily covers politics in Washington for Reuters  And he doesn’t mind saying that he finds it tougher to photograph funerals than he used to.  “When you’re young,” Mr. Downing said, “your ambition clouds your vision. You’re more interested in being a dashing photojournalist than a thinking photojournalist. As you get older, you get more compassionate, more human. To see a grieving widow or father or mother — it’s too real.”  His thoughts turned again to Mrs. Youngblood. “She’s the one that impacted me the most because the moment I took that picture I realized that this woman lives in a very dark place,” Mr. Downing said.  “She was pregnant with her second child when her husband was killed and I just can’t open my feelings enough to understand what she’s going through,” he said. “When you lose someone in a war, there’s support from whatever branch of the military you were in, or from Arlington Cemetery. And there are support groups out there. But that all fades very quickly. And you’re left alone. And now she’s left alone with her children.”  Mr. Downing paused and then slipped into the awkward language that photographers use when they’re still trying to guard their emotions.  “I’d like to give her a hug, because I never did. I made the picture and then I walked away.”  So did Mrs. Youngblood. He has never seen her again.
Larry Downing tries, as journalists do, to keep subjects at arm's length. Stephen Crowley says he makes an exception at Arlington Cemetery.