The monument: A simple V-shaped cleft in the Washington Mall whose stone walls bear the names of the 58,000 servicemen who died in the Vietnam War between 1961 and 1973.

Why to go: This monument is the stuff of legend. A 20-year-old Yale architecture student, fulfilling a class assignment and with no thought of entering the official competition, draws a simple dark cleft on paper – her rendering looks like the slash of a deep wound – as a proposed monument to the Vietnam War on the Washington, DC Mall. Later, she decides to enter the competition and her design wins. At first its simplicity stirs resentments. Some veterans call it a “gash of shame” and claim its abstraction is a slap at the memory of the 58,000 servicemen who died in Vietnam. But as time passes and people contemplate just what Maya Lin has offered, the genius of her dramatically stark design wins over an entire nation.

Lin wisely sensed that words, commentary or literal representations could not serve the purposes of this particular memorial. The war it commemorates bitterly divided the nation, and there was nothing anybody could say that would bridge that perceptual gap. Instead, she decided simply to chisel the names of all who had died in Vietnam on black granite walls. Depending on the observer, they would be a mute testimony – or rebuke – to the war.

But she took the drama of her presentation of carefully inscribed names one step further through the shape she gave the monument. The smooth, serene plane of the Mall is suddenly broken by a cleft that gradually gains depth, much as the plane of America’s previously placid existence began slowly dropping into a seeming abyss as the war began impinging more and more on the nation’s life.

Each visitor, sensing the meaning of this break in the earth, quietly takes in the long stretch of names that first appear on the few square inches of stone at the start of the incision, then become overwhelming in number and effect as the cut plunges deeper and the wall of names looms higher. As the war symbolically fades to its end up the other side, finally rejoining the normal plane of American life, visitors reach the end of the war and are left to contemplate what they have seen.

In the process, they haven’t been told what to think or feel. The power of loss is impressed onto them by the simple presentation of the names of all the men, each one of them a world unto himself, who died in that war. Because of its “show, don’t tell” sensibility, this simplest of monuments is also the most visited in Washington, DC.

What to add to the journey: Washington, DC is one of the best tourist towns in the U.S. There’s the Capitol, the White House, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, the National Aeronautics and Space Museum, Arlington Cemetery, the Lincoln and Washington Monuments, the Jefferson Memorial, the Pentagon, Georgetown, the Potomac River and its carefully preserved old canal, the Kennedy Center and the National Cathedral.

Oh, and there’s nearby Baltimore’s Camden Yards baseball stadium. Enough said.