With nearly 1,300 US soldiers killed in Iraq so far, and that number likely to top 2,000 in the years ahead, America's great imperial graveyard, Arlington National Cemetery, is coming under pressure not seen since the Vietnam war to accommodate the nation's honoured war dead. Every month some 500 burials take place at the cemetery.
The most picturesque landscape associated with the US capital, Arlington is not actually in the District of Columbia, but lies across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, only a few hundred metres from the Pentagon.
Set on 250 gently sloping hectares, the final resting place for many of the country's fallen warriors had been the beloved plantation of Robert E. Lee, the American general who, with his native state of Virginia, seceded from the Union, launching the civil war.
Taken as war booty by the North (though the government later paid his family for it), Arlington became America's first national cemetery in 1870. And the first military grave was dug there by a former slave who'd lived on Lee's plantation.
Today, 260,000 Americans lie there. Many were warriors, but not all. The most famous grave is probably that of president John F. Kennedy, himself a second world war hero in the South Pacific. Kennedy was buried on a hill overlooking the Lincoln Memorial on a bitterly cold November morning, four days after being assassinated, aged 43.
Forty-one years later, the eternal flame requested by Jacqueline Kennedy still flickers brightly over his simple flat black slate marker. She is buried next to him, along with their first child, who was stillborn.