National Memorial for Afghanistan and Iraq Wars Dead

Memorial day has passed yet I am still playing with an idea.  This now famous photo captures everything about the horror of war.  The young woman's fiancee was killed in Iraq.  All of their plans for a life together are a total loss.  I hope she will someday recover from her grief, meet another young man to love, marry, have a happy life.  From time to time she will think of her dead fiancee, but move on to her new life.  It's only fair that her life not be totally ruined by war.

But I also got to thinking: will this photo and photos like it of grieving mothers, wives, and daughters be the only memorial to the thousands of Americans killed in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?  Everyone has an opinion on whether the war was right, but thousands of sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers have died there.  Tens of thousands have been wounded, maimed, or crippled, physically and mentally.  Congress has shown itself more interested in buying more tanks and planes to support their districts than in providing funds to support veterans transition into work after returning from war.  Nevertheless, perhaps the house and senate could accept a memorial for those killed.

Americans are sometimes fast and sometimes slow to memorialize their dead.  The Vietnam Veterans memorial went up less than a decade after soldiers left Vietnam.  The World War II memorial went up six decades after the war ended.  Young men and women have been dying in Afghanistan for almost a dozen years.  Longer than any other war.  Will their deaths be ignored and forgotten by everyone other than the small portion of the population that still volunteers for military service?

People in the armed forces find people aren't aware of the sacrifices being made in the wars, other than token clapping at a baseball game.  Like the wars in Indochina, Americans have a wide range of opinion on the wars begun a dozen years ago.  The Vietnam war tore the nation apart, while the current wars, particularly the human cost, have been pushed out of mind, sometimes intentionally by government censorship, sometimes by apathy and concern over other matters like a desperate economy.

Usually Americans will join to honor the people who die in American wars.  Perhaps we need to discuss how we will remember the current war's dead, other than a girl in tears on a grave.

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