Seth Moulton quoted in an article by Elliot Ackerman in Smithsonian Magazine (2019). How Should We Memorialize Those Lost in the War on Terror?

Americans have erected countless monuments to wars gone by. But how do we pay tribute to the fallen in a conflict that might never end?

After reading Jon Schwarz's piece in The Intercept about the public comment period for the Global War On Terror Memorial I proceeded to make myself feel a little sick with anger envisioning inappropriate memorial ideas.

In real life, everyday I enounter service members who suffer as a result of a very long and ongoing war. I care about them and the consequences of these wars.

Ackerman piee linked and a recent piee in The Washington Post changed my perspective about this public somment period. I doubt that I will post a comment, but with Akerman's intervention at least I can imagine making a genuine comment.

Here's an article at VA News about the public comment period. And here's a link to the Global War On Terrorism Memorial Foundation.

A poem from the U.S. Poet Laureate

Juan Felipe Herrera, 1948

        RIP Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Dallas police        officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith,        Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa—and all         their families. And to all those injured.

                                                  Let us celebrate the lives of all

As we reflect & pray & meditate on their brutal deaths

Let us celebrate those who marched at night who spoke of peace

& chanted Black Lives Matter

Let us celebrate the officers dressed in Blues ready to protect 

Let us know the departed as we did not know them before—their faces,

Bodies, names—what they loved, their words, the stories they often spoke

Before we return to the usual business of our days, let us know their lives intimately

Let us take this moment & impossible as this may sound—let us find 

The beauty in their lives in the midst of their sudden & never imagined vanishing

Let us consider the Dallas shooter—what made him

                                                           what happened in Afghanistan

                                           what             flames burned inside

(Who was that man in Baton Rouge with a red shirt selling CDs in the parking lot

Who was that man in Minnesota toppled on the car seat with a perforated arm 

& a continent-shaped flood of blood on his white T who was

That man prone & gone by the night pillar of El Centro College in Dallas)

This could be the first step 

            in the new evaluation of our society    This could be

                the first step of all of our lives

Copyright © 2016 by Juan Felipe Herrera. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 10, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.