I. A Foolish Nation Forgets Its Heroes

How shall we remember our heroes? And how shall we encourage more heroism in the future? These questions reach deep into the moral foundation of the American republic, and yet they are also important strategic questions. As another anniversary of 9/11 looms near, we should all understand this reality: The United States will be strong and secure only as long as it has brave men and women willing to fight for it.
Indeed, never in U.S. history have the twinned issues of remembrance and encouragement—looking to the past, looking to the future—been more important than now. So we, the people, must take history into our own hands; we must take control of the memorial building process, taking it away from defeatist elitists, effete aesthetes, unelected bureaucrats, environmental-impact-statement-mongering filibusterers.
For too long, these non-representative snobs have been allowed to dominate the process of American commemoration—and it shows. We can see their handiwork on the National Mall in Washington D.C.

But why do we face this challenge? Here’s why: The Pentagon declares that the U.S. is in the midst of “The Long War”—a struggle which could go on for decades, maybe longer.That’s not only the judgment of the blustery ex-Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld; that’s also the assessment of his sober-minded successor at DOD, Robert Gates.

In fact, common sense tells us that we live in a world, now, in which super-destructive individuals can do the lethal work once done only by superpowers. So the global War on Terror, as the Bush administration calls it, might never end. And that’s a “long twilight struggle” that could dwarf even the Cold War, especially if crises in Iran and Pakistan continue to heat up. But speaking of the Cold War, how about those Russians? If “The Long War” is with us, so, quite possibly, is a renewed struggle with Moscow. And does anybody want to bet that China will prove to be a solid friend in the next few decades?

In other words, it’s never been more important to have American warriors at the ramparts of our freedom and security. And yet here on the homefront, how good a job are we doing at honoring our warriors? Are we taking good care of them when they get back from the battlefield? And amidst all the controversy over current war policy, are we doing everything to make sure that the best and the brightest and the bravest see the military as an honorable calling—as perhaps the most honorable calling? Doves and hawks must remember, always, that the nation has needs that transcend any president, any party, any particular policy. And so the work of commemoration must always be ongoing, overriding any partisan or ideological feuds.

In the meantime, the seventh anniversary of 9/11 comes up in just a few weeks. And the seventh anniversary of Operation Enduring Freedom, which liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban, comes on October 7. And next March 19 is the sixth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Here’s the rub: Typically, war memorials are built after the war ends—but as we have seen, these wars are unlikely to end anytime soon. Some argue, of course, that George W. Bush has mishandled the War on Terror, but whatever one thinks of Iraq, the plain fact is that Usama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are sworn enemies of the United States, without much regard to the identity of the next occupant of the White House. As they say, just because you lose interest in a war, that doesn’t mean the war has lost interest in you.

So, where are the Afghanistan and Iraq memorials—the memorials we need to commemorate past sacrifice and incentivize future volunteers? It might seem that the slowness to get going on these memorials is simply a matter of inertia or incompetence. But, in fact, the absence of a decision to go forward is, in fact, a decision. The powers-that-be have decided not to do anything right now. They are hiding the process in a bureaucratic black box, determined to build future memorials their way, in accordance with their own elitist dictates.

Meanwhile, our national morale is lessened by the lack of updated inspiration. A visitor to the Marine Corps War Memorial, located in Arlington, Va., can see, today, all the inscriptions on the pedestal supporting the famous statue of the six Marines who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Neatly inscribed on that pedestal, in gold letters, are names of the past wars and major battles of the U.S.M.C., starting with “Revolutionary War 1775-1783.” But the last such inscription is “Somalia 1992-1994.” Nothing is said about the many combats and sacrifices of the last 14 years.

When do you suppose that the Afghanistan and Iraq wars will be similarly inscribed on the Marine Memorial pedestal? And how long will it be before those conflicts receive their own specific memorials? And who will design them? As we shall see, the design of past memorials has been intensely controversial, and as a general rule, “traditional” military design has been pushed aside by “modern” designs that have the effect of muting and minimizing patriotic themes and martial achievement. Such muting and minimizing is never put to a national vote, or even a vote in Congress. Instead, the actual design and construction is overseen by a powerful arts establishment, which has used “experts” and lawyers to create a non-transparent process that works to waylay familiar patriotic design and replace it with an unheroic aesthetic that is light years away from the raw and proud reality of fighting men and women.

Thus the big questions: How long will we have to wait for a war memorial for our new heroes? And should we trust the elites to do the designing? Or should we, the people, start doing it ourselves? I say that we should start doing it ourselves. That’s right, we should just do it. Fortunately, the Internet makes it easy for tradition-minded patriots to come together to exchange their own ideas, to make their own designs—with no supervision from their “betters.” Indeed, regular people can even ‘build” their own virtual memorial, or memorials, online.

Some of what was produced would be horribly tasteless, but, in the cyber-world, that’s not so unusual. What would be noticed would be the individual and collective efforts of millions of Americans, all working together to create fitting memorials to America’s warriors.

And of course, if enough citizens put their collective heart into this effort, the politicians would have to take notice, even obey the manifest will of the majority. If Americans organized themselves online, in the virtual world, they could eventually transfer that muscle to the real world of politics and budgets. And that’s how a truly popular war memorial, reflective of our deepest patriotic instincts, could be designed and constructed on the Mall. The American people could do this if they wanted to. They just have to want to.

II. Looking Backward, Before We Look Ahead

A war memorial should serve two purposes: First, it should commemorate the sacrifices of war—not just of those who died, but also of those who survived and came home. Second, it should inspire new generations to emulate the heroism of their predecessors. Nations survive only when they are united by common symbols and beliefs. And war memorials are an obvious place to express love of country.

Once upon a time, war memorials were big and imposing, including one in Boston, and one in Indianapolis. And of course, just about every town and village had its own modest but heartfelt memorial, such as in Centreville, Alabama.

The Marine Corps War Memorial, dedicated in 1954, is similarly realistic and rousing. The Felix de Weldon statue recreates the flag-raising on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi on February 23, 1945. Even though a nearby plaque notes that three of the six Marines depicted were subsequently killed on that Pacific Island, it’s hard to think of a more memorable war image—or a better recruiting tool for the Marines.

Then came Vietnam—and the rise of a left-leaning counterculture, which quickly became the new liberal establishment. The Indochina conflict is represented by more gold letters on the Marine Memorial, but the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the other side of the Potomac River, is remarkable for its dark defeatism. Of course it is dark and defeatist—it was designed to be that way. Here’s the way the young architect, Maya Lin, described her winning design in March 1981:

Walking through this park-like area, the memorial appears as a rift in the earth [emphasis added], a long, polished, black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth. Approaching the memorial, the ground slopes gently downward and the low walls emerging on either side, growing out of the earth, extend and converge at a point below and ahead. Walking into this grassy site contained by the walls of the memorial we can barely make out the carved names upon the memorial’s walls. These names, seemingly infinite in number, convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals into a whole.

Which is to say, “The Wall,” dedicated in 1982, was intended as a tombstone—or, more precisely, a cenotaph, which is a marker for bodies that rest elsewhere. Don’t take my word for it; here’s Lin quoted on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial home page: “This memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember them.” The Vietnam memorial was extremely controversial at first, but it has grown in popularity, as families and veterans have made a rite of touching the names of loved ones and comrades, perhaps taking home a pencil-rubbing.

Cemeteries are popular for the same reason. But war memorials are supposed to be more than just “rifts in the earth”; they are forward-looking, as well as backward-looking. But the artistic elites, of course, were proud of their handiwork. They “commemorated” a war that they despised with a memorial that looks like a tombstone.

In the years that followed, the same anti-military elites, operating out of positions of privileged power, such as the National Capital Planning Commission, and the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, were able to derail other plans for heroic memorials—boosted, of course, by the then all-powerful Main Stream Media. In the 80s, for example, the U.S. Navy had the idea of putting a triumphal arch over Pennsylvania Avenue. Needless to say, the planners all said “no,” and on cue, the MSM echoed their arguments. And so the Navy Memorial, dedicated in 1987, turned out be a big flat disappointment; despite its location on Pennsylvania Avenue, it is virtually unnoticed.

But by the 90s, the cultural wheel had started to turn. In the decades since the Vietnam Memorial controversy, the 40th and 50th anniversaries of D-Day became national and international moments. Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation became a best-seller, and “Saving Private Ryan” and “Band of Brothers” became revered films. And so while the World War Two Memorial was controversial in some quarters—”watered down Albert Speer,” snapped The New Yorker—and was, of course, reduced in size and scope by the D.C. arts-ocracy, it was, nonetheless, a welcome return to past standards of inspirational memorial-building when it was finally finished in 2004.

And while some may quibble over the exact design of the U.S. Air Force Memorial, dedicated in 2006, it is unmistakably vertical, and visible from miles away—as it should be.

So while there is some good news to report on the monument front, some cloudy areas still remain. In New York City, for example, the local power structure wants to build new office buildings on the site of the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center. Note to NYC: The proper memorial to the thousands of people who were murdered in office buildings is not another set office buildings—which will, by the way, if they are ever built, be oh-so-tempting targets for terrorists. But in a discouraging display of bipartisan misgovernment, the city and state of New York have been determined to commercialize sacred ground. And it’s only small comfort that they can’t even commercialize very well, mired as they are in litigation and funding squabbles. By contrast, after the 1995 Oklahoma City truck bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, the people of Oklahoma simply built a beautiful memorial—government offices can go somewhere else.

III. Beginning the Great Work of the Afghanistan and Iraq War Memorials

Some day, there will be memorials for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. But here’s a prediction: Given the unpopularity of Iraq, in particular, as well as the elite disdain for President Bush, the same artsy elites who turned the Vietnam Memorial into a rift in the earth will try to do the same thing to the Global War on Terror. They will let their politics get in the way of their patriotism. They will make the memorials as unheroic as possible.

But merely writing to your Congressman to express your support for a bold and proud memorial will not get the job done. In the past, as we have seen, politicians have been eager to kick controversial decisions over to bureaucrats and commissions. Their strategy: Let them do what they want with our national memorials, but letting them take the heat for unpopular decisions. For their part, the arts-elitists know that they are safe, snug as they are in their well-funded bureaucracies, foundations, and activist groups. It’s all an elaborate legal and political scam, in which the good, patriotic impulses of Americans are transmuted into ‘high art” by out-of-touch snobs. And yet, as we have seen, that scam has worked to put the Vietnam Memorial below ground, to neuter the Navy Memorial, and to shrink down the World War Two Memorial.

And so regular Americans ought to get there first—to make sure, for example, that the next memorials are above ground and are fully heroic. We should have war memorials that we can look up to, literally. Because whatever one thinks of Afghanistan and Iraq, the fact remains that the men and women over there are fighting for us. The memorials are built for our military heroes, and for the American people who raised them up for their heroism.

So we, the people, must take matters into our own hands. If we want to properly memorialize past sacrifice, and to effectively to motivate future service, we must do the work ourselves. We must go online—to organize and, more to the point, to imagine. We must create our own ideas as to how an Iraq/Afghanistan/War on Terror memorial should look.

In addition, several admirable efforts have been made to put the Vietnam Memorial online. But these memorials are mostly just reflections of the existing physical design. Our goal should be to create a vision of the future memorials, which will then, in turn, signal to Washington insiders that the American people want to honor sacrifice and celebrate heroism. If the American people don’t trust the elites—and they shouldn’t—then once again, they should roll up their sleeves and do the work themselves.

What might such a virtual memorial look like? As initial reference points, we might note that there are plenty of online memorials now, for victims of disease, even for pets. These are starting places; the Internet is still a young medium, offering vast potential for discovery and creativity.

Obviously, architecture and engineering are big factors in any prospective design, and so we might take note, for instance, of Sim City, as one place where websurfers are free to visualize all kinds of new structures.

Going further, we might even look to SecondLife.com. To be sure, Second Life has a reputation for wackiness, but any Web site, like any other communications medium, is a function of who uses it. The technology itself is neutral; depending on the purpose of the user, it can be employed to design great memorials—or, of course, purple-haired flying monsters.

If you were designing an Afghanistan or Iraq War Memorial, what would you include? Would it include statues? Would they be heroic figures in combat, or soldiers handing out candy to children? Or both? Maybe it would be in color, so that the purple thumbs of Iraqi voters could be depicted. And would the structure be columns? Pyramids? Towers?

Such envisioning is not a waste of time. Every piece of great design and construction started out as the gleam in someone’s eye. But today, instead of scratches in the sand or a blueprint, the vision of the new structure can go online, on a website, where everyone can see it and critique and improve on it. And the Internet greatly accelerates the process of instant organization: Newt Gingrich, for example, generated 1.4 million signatures for his “drill here, drill now, pay less” petition drive. And it worked. Thanks to Gingrich’s smart use of the Internet, the American people rose up to demand action, pushing aside the arrogant elitists who opposed such drilling. So now we will drill here, we will drill now, and we will pay less. If that elite-disempowering process can be used for energy production, it can also be used on war-memorial production.

If Americans could pull together, perhaps through some sort of competition or contest, then the design imagined by the American people could be the design that one day graces The Mall. The elitists who currently control “the arts” would be horrified, but heroes—past, present, future—would be gratified.

And of course, today, other technologies can also contribute to the memorializing process: What about video—and not just short video snippets, but a whole epic? What about music? What about interactivity? What about technologies that create a collectively immersive experience?

“People will not look forward to posterity,’ wrote the great conservative Edmund Burke, “who never look backward to their ancestors.” Burke was right when he declared that society is a sacred pact: a pact between the living, the dead, and the yet to be born.

In other words, the American people today are part of a great chain. We are the living link between those who have gone before us, and those who will come after us.

So we must make the effort to do right in our time, to honor our past, and to secure our future. Our heroes sacrificed a lot for us. Now we are called to give a little back to them.