Vets Remember at WWII Memorial
WASHINGTON, Nov 10 – On a chilly yet sunny Wednesday morning, dozens of white-haired men and women solemnly strolled around the recently opened World War II Memorial. Wrapped in warm coats, some walking with the help of canes and many wearing caps loaded with patriotic pins, the veterans’ eyes moistened as six-decades-old memories converged with the fresh images of the fight in Iraq.
This Veterans Day is the second consecutive the country celebrates at war, and it is expected to draw crowds to the monument plaza, the last to open on the National Mall, that pays tribute to the 16 million U.S. men and women who served in 1941-1945.
Among the first to arrive at the memorial was Edward Roser, a 76 year-old Navy Seabee veteran from West Shokan, N.Y. This year, Roser said, he plans to pay respects not only to the men he met while serving in the South Pacific but also to those deployed in Iraq.
“We all are veterans, we all do the same thing: defend our country,” a somber Roser said.
Amid heavy combat in the insurgent city of Fallujah — and with over 1,140 combat deaths in the 21-month-long war in Iraq — veterans present in the capital for the multiple wreath laying ceremonies taking place Thursday said they will have their minds and hearts with the families of those serving in the Gulf.
Walking along the sober granite plaza of the World War II Memorial in the company of his wife and daughter, Richard Neal, a veteran pilot from North Canaan, Conn., said he planned to say a Veterans Day “prayer for all the boys and girls in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
As with much of the country, conflicting views about the war in Iraq can be found in this veterans’ spot, which is located between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.
While James E. Shugars, 78, a veteran from North Carolina, saw the action in Iraq “as an opportunity to get some democracy in an area a lot older than Western civilization,” fellow veteran George H. Smith, from Iowa, said he believed the country “should have never started the war. Instead we should have cooperated with the United Nations.”
Aside from their personal stances on the Iraq war, a common thought among World War II veterans is that their monument was long overdue. Approved by Congress in 1995, the $175 million monument was opened to the public on April 29 and dedicated in a ceremony that drew 150,000 veterans on Memorial Day weekend. And while the official Veterans Day ceremonies will take place across the Potomac River in Arlington National Cemetery, the new monument will have private ceremonies for veterans’ families.
“I wanted to come here ever since it was opened,” Neal said. “I just wished they would have built this place earlier so that more veterans could have seen it.”
Neal, who was deployed in England and will celebrate his 80 th birthday this weekend, is one of the 210,000 men and women from Connecticut who served in World War II.
Over 4,500 state residents died overseas.
The state’s commissioner of Veterans Affairs, Linda Schwartz, also said the memorial has come late for the majority of the people who served that war. “Around 1,300 World War II veterans are passing away every day,” she said.
The aged men and women strolling along the wreathed columns shared the place with scores of high school students and eighth graders who didn’t pay close attention to the inscriptions on pride, freedom and brave actions but rather mingled and played by the fountain.
“Young people don’t know anything about what happened in the Second World War,” Smith said. “That is why it is so important that we have a memorial, like Vietnam and Korean veterans do.”
As Schwartz sees it, “the monument is necessary because if it wasn’t for that generation the world would be much different.”
Meanwhile Neal, Shugars, Smith and Roser, all veterans of the Second World War, returned the compliment to the men and women in Iraq. “They are worth all the respect we can give them,” Shugars said.
