It doesn't seem like so long ago that I saw Arlington West the first time. Already, over 1000 soldiers had been killed. Now today, there were so many that it took a long time to walk through them all. Many of those killed were younger than my son. Many of the grave markers had been lettered by school children with clumsy handwriting. Children passing the exhibit were asking difficult questions and parents were answering with tenderness and concern. Teens were photographing the markers with their cell phone cameras. Elderly WW II vets came, their hats displaying their military service and their antiwar buttons. One of them told a woman, "I know more about war than he (Bush) will ever know."
Toward the front of the exhibit I noticed pieces of paper tapes to grave markers, about a dozen names to a marker. I realized that those were soldiers who had died in the past few days, and there had been no time to make real markers for them. The mood at Green Lake was contemplative, not the mood of a military parade or homecoming, but of general realization of needless death.
For more information, see Vets for Peace, a humanitarian and educational organization devoted to the abolishment of war. http://www.vetsforpeace.org
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