Honoring Veterans’ Service, All Year Long

We can’t blame you, all of you, in the thousands, who showed up for the big Concert for Valor on the National Mall last year, what with the presence of Bruce Springsteen, Rihanna, the Black Keys, Carrie Underwood, Dave Grohl, Tom Hanks, Will Smith and Oprah Winfrey.

But throughout the year, not only on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, Washington is a place where the idea of valor, service and sacrifice is honored all over the city, especially on the Mall, among the memorials and on the green spaces and miles of crosses at Arlington National Cemetery.

The cemetery seems at once simple and profound: the vast expanse of sky, the row upon row of markers, the names, the flags and flowers here and there and the annual ceremonies surrounding the wreath laying. It is hallowed ground for the men and women who have throughout history gone to places in the world where they’d never imagined they’d be, served and often died there. It is a place that speaks to a part of our history and to progress amid what often seems like perpetual conflict.

In Washington, you can bear witness to service at places that bear witness to the far-flung struggles in which we’ve engaged as a nation, to the leaders that led us through two major and tragic wars, to the different ways members of the military serve and often suffer.

The latest such memorial is the American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial near the Botanic Garden, where a star-shaped fountain and an always-lit ceremonial flame pay tribute to disabled veterans.

On Pennsylvania Avenue, the Navy Memorial speaks to all the ships at sea, to the sailors (and aviators) that keep them afloat throughout the world in times of peace and war. The Iwo Jima Memorial, actually the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial, is here and, farther off, the striking sculpture for the Air Force Memorial.

But it’s at a spacious corner of the Mall itself where our wars, our soldiers and our veterans are honored by proximity. Here is the Lincoln Memorial, presided over by Abraham Lincoln, who presided over our bloodiest conflict. And it’s his presence that speaks most honorably to the conflicts of America, the Civil War and all the others. Not far off are the shiny, dark walls of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with the 50,000 names carved on it, to remember the cost of that war. Across the reflecting pool is the Korean War Veterans Memorial, with its company of weary, heavily armed infantry trudging up a hill. Not far off is the Roosevelt Memorial to the man who presided over our critical participation in World War II.

The National World War II Memorial, a more recent addition, shines a light on the depth and breadth of that effort, where you can still see an ever-dwindling number of veterans from that war, brought there once again to still remember.

In that corner of the Mall, the cost of maintaining this democracy, always and forever, becomes vividly real.