“Peace on earth,” the guard said as he read our sign out loud. “What an idea.”
As George rolled up the sign and put it under his arm, the guard saw us fumbling to capture the meaning of his words.
“You don’t think I’m for war, do you?” he snapped.
The guard probably saw hundreds of people a day at the memorial. As the prospect of a new war loomed, just 30 years after this one, he had pulled duty at the stark, black wall with the 58,000 names etched on it.
George and I walked on to the huge white “temple” nearby, the Lincoln Memorial. We climbed the smooth marble steps and gazed at the towering sculpture of the somber president who oversaw a divided nation, which resulted in the deaths of 620,000 soldiers, according to some estimates. Now, nearly 150 years later, we were a divided nation once again on the brink of war, only this time the war would be fought in a faraway land.
George and I walked a short distance to the Korean War Memorial. It commemorated our fathers’ war. (The memorial of their other war that had occurred seven years earlier was in the process of being built further down the mall.)
The memorial’s triangular shape and its position on the mall opposite the Vietnam and Lincoln Memorials, called to mind the demands that war makes on our young. The faces of the immobile metal figures are grim. Their hunched stance caused by the weight of their equipment and the weariness of war contradicts the men’s otherwise youthful strength and presumed optimism in the future.
On this Memorial Day, let us honor our dead by asking why we are willing to sacrifice our young for the “just” causes of the old? Let us likewise seek to devise alternative ways of settling our conflicts without going to war.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
