Korean War Memorial -- Washington, D.C.
On a recent trip to Washington I borrowed a bicycle and rode from Capitol Hill along the Mall and past the Washington Monument to the new memorial commemorating World War II… it’s a beautiful tribute to all the states which sent soldiers to the front lines… riding beyond the monument takes you along the Reflecting Pool to the Lincoln Memorial… I rode across the Arlington Memorial Bridge and then turned back to cross back over the Potomac…
That run is like a path of remembrance of America’s conflicts and leaders… America’s most hallowed moments and people are commemorated there … it’s easy to believe the very best of our nation along that great axis…
After riding back across the bridge I rode to the Korean War Memorial which I had never seen… as I got to the outer periphery of the monument I encountered a crowd of about 150 Korean veterans flowing along the path… it looked as though they had come from someplace in the heartland as a group to remember their shared service… they all wore matching caps … many used canes or walkers or were pushed in wheelchairs… a number of young servicemen in uniform accompanied these old warriors in a show of respect quietly assisting and attentively listening to remembrances of those cold Korean winters… I slowed my pace as I entered this stream of pensioners… all those kind old souls gently looked at me as I bowed my head in respect… thank you men… I remember and honor you…
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| ~~~~ “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the official surface courteousness of the Generals, not the few great battles) of the Secession war; and it is best they should not—the real war will never get in the books.
In the mushy influences of current times, too, the fervid atmosphere and typical events of those years are in danger of being totally forgotten. I have at night watch’d by the side of a sick man in the hospital, one who could not live many hours. I have seen his eyes flash and burn as he raised himself and recurr’d to the cruelties on his surrender’d brother, and mutilations of the corpse afterward. |
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| Such was the war. It was not a quadrille in a ball-room. Its interior history will not only never be written—its practicality, minutiæ of deeds and passions, will never be even suggested. The actual soldier of 1862–’65, North and South, with all his ways, his incredible dauntlessness, habits, practices, tastes, language, his fierce friendship, his appetite, rankness, his superb strength and animality, lawless gait, and a hundred unnamed lights and shades of camp, I say, will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be.”~~~~
Walt Whitman — Specimen Days |
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To the veterans and the families of those killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan a special message of remembrance…
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