Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia
AA-2026-17730B
On the image
Three soldiers of the Old Guard walk their measured twenty-one steps in front of the Memorial Amphitheatre, rifles carried at the shoulder in the precise, joyless posture the Army has decided best honours the dead. Nobody watching behind the rope line is dressed for a solemn occasion in any modern sense, the women in bright print dresses and the men in narrow ties, because in this decade Arlington National Cemetery was simply what a family did on a trip to Washington.
A man near the rope holds his camera at the ready, confident that a single click will capture the discipline of the ritual, though what he will actually get is three men mid-stride and a crowd squinting into the sun. A little girl in red pants stands gripping the barrier, too young to know what an Unknown Soldier is, old enough to sense that everyone around her has gone quiet for a reason.
The guards themselves look through the crowd rather than at it, trained to the point where an audience becomes furniture. Their precision is the whole performance, a ceremony repeated so many thousands of times by so many young men that it long ago stopped being for any one soldier and became instead a demonstration of how seriously a nation can commit to repeating the same forty feet of pavement.
The historian's note
The scene takes place at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, before the Memorial Amphitheatre, whose colonnade appears in the background. The changing of the guard, performed continuously since 1937 by soldiers of the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Regiment, the Old Guard, was already a well-established public ritual by the 1960s and a standard stop for visitors to Washington, D.C.
The tomb itself, dedicated in 1921 to honour an unidentified American soldier of the First World War, had by this decade come to represent unknown dead of subsequent conflicts as well, including the Second World War and the Korean War. Public attendance at the ceremony grew steadily through the postwar decades as automobile travel and family tourism to the capital increased.
The rifles carried by the guard are M14s, standard issue during this period, used here in a ceremonial rather than combat role as part of the formalised drill maintained by the regiment.
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Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington, 1960s Changing of the Guard. 1960–1969. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-17730B. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/tomb-of-the-unknown-soldier-arlington-1960s-changing-of-the-guard.
@misc{aaAA202617730B,
title = {Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington, 1960s Changing of the Guard},
year = {1960–1969},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-17730B},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/tomb-of-the-unknown-soldier-arlington-1960s-changing-of-the-guard}
}TY - ART TI - Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington, 1960s Changing of the Guard PY - 1960–1969 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-17730B UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/tomb-of-the-unknown-soldier-arlington-1960s-changing-of-the-guard ER -
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