I visited Washington, D.C. some years ago, with an old friend, Jack. We spent the day touring the war memorials. Over the years, I’d come across war memorials in local parks or seen others in center cities. They always appeared high and lifted up, noble, designed to inspire lofty sentiments of physical courage, duty, and honor. The memorials were grand statements about the conduct of war and the heroism of its combatants.
We went to the WWII memorial first.
It was open and spacious like a Roman portico, and while not as magisterial as statues of men riding in triumph on horseback holding swords – the kind I’d often seen on town greens – there was still something noble and grand that the monument conveyed. It suggested to me a quiet and understated dignity, maybe a humble commentary that we had served the world justly by vanquishing the then demonic regimes of Italy and Germany.
I saw an elderly man. He wore old wool uniform, the kind issued during the Second World War. On the arm of his Eisenhower jacket, the three chevrons and rocker of the platoon sergeant showed. The man was a veteran. He wore several ribbons. Why was he here? Did he come to remember the combat, or to recall the camaraderie that soldiers develop? Perhaps he was remembering lost comrades. I don’t know. I didn’t speak to him. It was he was a walking memorial, a living witness to those tumultuous years.
We went next to the Korean War Memorial. I had a different reaction to seeing it. It did not seem grand at all. It was somber. The memorial portrays foot soldiers doing what foot soldiers always do, mostly slogging along in the mud while carrying their rifles.
It was overcast that day in Washington, D.C. The soldiers in the Korean War Memorial wore ponchos suggesting that they were walking in the rain. Their expressions appear ghostlike, weary and impassive as if life had been drained from them, and with nothing left, they could only move like automatons. It was a statement of quiet desperation, bleakness but also the determination to survive.
The statement the memorial made wasn’t grand or lofty, but more mundane, portraying of the realities of the battlefield; endurance, hardship and monotony. We left. Then we visited the Vietnam War Memorial.
There, you don’t look up. You descend down into the earth, a powerful statement in itself. Below ground, I see the names of those who lost their lives inscribed in marble, like names on grave markers. Here and there people have left flowers or notes written and pasted up over names of loved ones. Occasionally I’d see a card or letter left on the ground as if it was mail waiting to be picked up. A woman gently rubbed her finger back and forth across a name. She seemed lost in thought. I think the Vietnam memorial brings home the quiet despair of the fallen, as the poet Thomas Gray’s elegiac poem does: “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Jack found his cousin’s name. He stood looking at it for a few minutes. He didn’t say anything. Few speak while standing in the memorial. Names make things personal.
As I considered what to write about our upcoming observance of Memorial Day, I thought of that day in Washington. On reflection I see a trend; war memorials are becoming less grand and glorious and instead revealing more of the down and dirty of real war, its bleakness, loss and carnage. It’s growing personal in its message. The names of those killed are inscribed on the wall of the Viet Nam Memorial and are viewed only in subdued light.
I find that mood hopeful. As romanticizing war becomes less credible, we may find ways to resolve our conflicts less violently. Today, with the recent spotlight on service persons returning home suffering PTSD, America has been confronted with how war destroys not only bodies, but also souls.
There’s no greater honor we might bestow on our fallen brothers and sisters than by beating our swords into ploughshares. It was in that hope that they gave their lives for us and for our country.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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