Americans honor dead veterans

SAN FRANCISCO – It took seven years after the fighting had ended for the nation to dedicate the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. This time around, Americans aren’t waiting for the shooting to stop.\nOn beaches and bases, town squares and veterans’ clubs, they are building their monuments to America’s fallen as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grind on.\nVietnam, in one way or another, looms large over this impulse to memorialize the war dead in real time. Some are erecting these monuments as anti-war statements against what they regard as another Vietnam; others are doing it to express their gratitude to the troops now, rather than later, as was done with the Vietnam veterans.\n“The sentiment of the nation – they’re more behind us this time. They saw what happened in Vietnam. They didn’t want to do that again to soldiers,” said Fort Stewart, Ga., spokesman Kevin Larson, emphasizing that he was speaking for himself, not for the Army base.\nThe names of the fallen are engraved on the rocks in a rambling stone wall in Asheville, N.C. They are etched in black marble at a military club in San Francisco and in black granite at the state Capitol in Salem, Ore. In Santa Monica, Santa Barbara and Lafayette, Calif., the Iraq toll is measured in thousands of white crosses.\nVeterans for Peace in North Carolina, an anti-war group, helped raise money for the Asheville monument.\n“Some of us are still young enough to remember the Vietnam War, and we see this war in Iraq as being very much the same sort of misguided adventure,” said past president Ken Ashe, who served two tours of duty in Vietnam.\nOregon taxpayers and other private donors financed the Afghan-Iraqi Freedom Memorial in Salem. It consists of a bronze statue of a kneeling soldier and a black granite wall engraved with the names of more than 70 soldiers and Marines with Oregon ties who have died in the two wars.