StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I did one of these last year, and now here we are again. This is the weekend the US remembers its fallen military men and women.

CNN has an article explaining one of the customs/honors at Arlington National Cemetery, the Riderless Horse. I was aware of the custom, but not that it had antecedents as far back as Ancient Rome.

The riderless horse of course is symbolic of the fact the fallen will never ride again. It shows that someone is missing, there is an empty seat at the table of life. The boots facing backward in the stirrups represent the departed's final look back at family, friends, and life.



Every nation has war memorials, often featuring heroic figures, horses, and the like. Post WWII some of them in the US started to include things like surplus tanks.



There is, however, a war memorial in the US that features none of these things, and was (and continues to be) quite controversial. Which is appropriate, as it commemorates the US fallen of what we call the the Viet Nam War (er, "Police Action") and the Vietnamese call the American War.

This is the view from above:



If you don't recognize it, well, that's because almost all pictures of it are from up close at ground level:



The focus is on the names. The memorial attempts to list by name, in order of their falling, every dead or missing-in-action soldier of the conflict (of course, with so many names the result has been less than perfect). This war memorial does not rise proudly into the air, it sinks into the ground.

The effect was profound.

People leave things at this memorial in a way they never did at others. The names were so personal - it wasn't just "this statue is for your father/brother/whoever", the person's NAME was there, right there, on a national monument, not because that person was a general or some famous person but because that person was part of this conflict. It was a hugely personal connection. People leave notes, items, medals, letters saying goodbye and letters talking about what has happened since the fallen fell. It says THIS is the cost of war - these are not abstractions, these are the people who died, who went missing, who never came home. This is not a monument to glorify war, it is a monument for mourning the lives war has destroyed. People come to this memorial to mourn. Big tough guys sob like toddlers over the names of their fallen comrades and friends, families cry over the names of their fallen, little children are lifted up to touch a name and told things like "This is the grandfather you never knew".



After that national monument was built other memorials to the Viet Nam fallen followed a similar motif:

Shippensburg, Virginia:


But the National Vietnam Memorial is unique - it travels. Well, the actual memorial itself does not travel, a replica of it does. Half size panels of the names travel the country. This is known as The Moving Wall:





A veteran visiting the national memorial in 1982 wanted to share the cathartic experience of visiting the monument with those unable to travel to the national site. Since 1984, The Moving Wall has toured the US. Demand was so high, in fact, that a second replica was made so there are now actually two Moving Walls.

Since the controversial building and opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial other war memorials in the US have also listed the names of the fallen as individuals. While this was not unprecedented prior to The Wall, since then it has been a virtual requirement. I believe it has also had an effect on "virtual memorials" (there is, in fact, a Virtual Wall Vietnam Memorial) on line where fallen soldiers are remembered with pictures and names and visitors can leave comments.

Of course, The Wall is not the sole cultural influence on how we mourn our dead and commemorate conflict, but it had an impact beyond what the creators intended, and in surprising ways.

I find that last pic very... human and striking.

These memorials aren't just for wars or for victories. They are in the memory of the individual people who have been lost. People with friends and families, parents and wives and children. The sheer enormity of those monuments and what they stand for is hard to put to words

I'm quite the enthusiast for 19th to early 20th century morturary art of all kinds, and a connoiseur of Civil War monuments especially.

Seems like every town in the US has a significant Civil War monument dating from 1890-1909 that would have cost many thousands of period dollars.
The one in Wichita's Maple Grove Cemetery was in about the same decrepit state last time I was there in 2001; you can barely make out the central flag pole in the photo, but it was very loose and you can see where it's movement in the wind has dislodged the central decorative cap on it's roof.
The interior of the roof was originally painted red, white, and blue, and those colors had faded badly in the 100 years since it was built.

All the same, I enjoyed it immensely for being in original condition.

Hamilton, Ohio's Soldiers and Sailors Monument, 5 years newer than the Wichita pavillion, but considerably better preserved, not to mention far more substantial a building.

If the account in one volume of Boothbay Harbor Historical Sketches is anything to judge by, the building of those CW soldier-statues was a contentious issue. For a small town, a statue like that would have been a substantial portion of the budget and there were plenty on the Boothbay town council who thought it was a bad use of the money to build one.

As I get older (and attend more funerals over time) I gain a greater and greater appreciation for the risks and sacrifices of those in the military. I was privileged to be born in the wealthiest and most powerful nation the world has ever known. I did not earn that - other people did, and they frequently earned it with their own flesh and blood.

Trace Adkins wrote a song about military sacrifice called "Arlington", and this is the video for it. That's the original version. The video specifically for Memorial Day has more funeral footage from Arlington National Cemetery, and more flags. Um, yeah, because we DO wave a lot of flags on Memorial Day, even by US standards. It's not that the military people fought or died for a piece of cloth, it was for the country represented by that flag.

Of course, there's more than one memorial song for the fallen:

If You're Reading This
8th of November
Some Gave All
Fallen Soldiers Tribute - I Am Still Here
In the Arms of an Angel - American Soldiers Tribute

Section 60 is the part of Arlington where military personnel who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan are being buried. There are raw patches of ground, and graves where the grass is still regrowing. There are temporary markers where graves are waiting for their headstones.



Last Goodbye: US Soldiers in Iraq

Not every tribute requires lyrics. Sometimes images say enough. Thanks to modern technology, images of any conflict are readily available. Final Salute: American Soldiers in Iraq WARNING: there are some graphic pictures of the damage war does to human bodies in this one.

But, you know, Memorial Day isn't just about the dead - there are still people fighting wars. This version of Letters From Home is my favorite, because the video part was put together by a soldier on active duty in Iraq. He made it in 2005 for his wife back home, but really it's timeless.

So those of you in the military today, whoever you may be and whatever you may be doing, please take care of yourself and come home safe. Your friends and loved ones are happy to wait a few decades before being handed a folded flag.

The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. - Douglas MacArthur

Taps at Arlington

Broomstick wrote:After that national monument was built other memorials to the Viet Nam fallen followed a similar motif

This is several days late, but in any case, the only time I visited the Wall was on a school field trip, years ago. One of my uncles served in the war as a Army Ranger, but he doesn't talk about it. I've known a few other vets from that time, but no one I know died or was seriously wounded there.

However, when I visited the wall, I looked to see if anyone had the same last name as mine, and I found one name.

There is a Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall in Philadelphia (picture from the website):

The Memorial Design

To avoid the possibility of controversy over the design of the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial the directors and Design Selection Committee, agreed that the seven-member jury panel chosen to select the memorial's design must include a majority of Vietnam combat veterans. The panel also included three noted architects selected by H. Mather Lippincott, Jr., whom the Memorial Fund had commissioned to oversee the design competition.

The competition, which was limited to submissions from those residing within a fifty-mile radius of Philadelphia, ran from August through October, 1985. A total of 102 entries were received, and on November 21, the seven jurors deliberated for nearly twelve hours before choosing the design submitted by Perry M. Morgan, a 27 year-old landscape architect with Sullivan Associates of Philadelphia.

Landscape architect Perry M. Morgan, the Memorial's designer, said that what he had hoped to accomplish was to honor the memory of those who had been killed in Vietnam as well as provide a place of contemplations for those who had returned from the war to reflect upon their experiences. Thus he created the concept of two facing walls - a curved wall inscribed with the names of the men killed in action facing a straight wall engraved with scenes from the war.

The two walls, creating an amphitheater-like setting, are composed of panels of polished, charcoal gray granite, selected by Morgan and quarried in Cold Spring, Minnesota. Stencils and screens were applied to the panels which were then sandblasted to engrave the names and replicate the scenes. The sandblasting was uniform on the panels on the wall of names, but was adjusted to allow various shades of gray to emerge on the scene panels.

The Name Panels

The southern wall containing the name panels is a concave structure, slightly raised in the center, on a higher plane than the opposing north wall inscribed with the scenes. Each panel is 34 inches wide, 56 inches high and 13 inches thick. Each name is inscribed in letters measuring 1-1/4 inches in height.

The Scene Panels

Based on the sketches by Tom Rice, a graduate student at Temple University's Tyler School of Art, each of the eight scene panels measures seven feet in height, five feet in width and thirteen inches in thickness. They are arranged in a left to right chronological sequence, beginning with the launching of the US carrier aircraft in August, 1964 and concluding with the rescue of Vietnamese refugees at the US Embassy in April, 1975.

To the left of the scene panels is a similarly sized panel inscribed with the insignias of the five branches of service above a world map; to the right is a panel inscribed with a large map of Southeast Asia.

I haven't seen this memorial in person, despite living in Philadelphia for a time.

Frank Hipper wrote:I'm quite the enthusiast for 19th to early 20th century morturary art of all kinds, and a connoiseur of Civil War monuments especially.

Seems like every town in the US has a significant Civil War monument dating from 1890-1909 that would have cost many thousands of period dollars.

Not commemorating the Civil War, of course, but we have the National Memorial Arch at Valley Forge National Historical Park which was built between 1914 and 1917:

The United States Memorial Arch, located at the intersection of Outerline Drive and Gulph Road, was erected to commemorate the arrival of General George Washington and his Continental Army into Valley Forge.

It was designed by Paul Philippe Cret, being a simplified version of the Triumphal Arch of Titus in Rome (A.D. 81) which marked the capture of Jerusalem by Emperor Titus in A.D. 70. In the classical tradition, the triumphal arch of one or three openings was erected to honor Generals or Emperors, so that this memorial arch with its single opening is classically proper as a national tribute to General Washington and the army he led.

In 1907, the Valley Forge Park Commission developed a plan for the construction of two arches, a Washington Arch at the Valley Creek entrance to the park, and a von Steuben Arch at the park entrance at the opposite end on Port Kennedy Road (North Gulph Road and Route 23). These were to serve as entrance gates (the park was enclosed with an iron fence at this time) as well as monuments honoring the two generals and the troops. The bill for the two arches at $50,000 each was approved by the House of Representatives in March 1910, but failed in the Senate. A bill for one arch was approved in October 1910 for $100,000. Funds were appropriated in 1911, construction began in 1914 and dedication ceremonies were conducted on June 19, 1917.

Here is my photo's original size, in case anyone cares to read the inscription.