Reflections Memorial Day
May 30, 2016jsc
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"Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
"A U.S. Marine salutes at a makeshift memorial for fallen soldiers during Rolling Thunder in Washington, D.C. For those who served during the War on Terror, there's no formal way for..."
WASHINGTON -- Seven thousand U.S. troops have died fighting terrorism, but they may never be memorialized on the National Mall like fallen soldiers of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
Pittsburgh veteran Andrew Brennan is leading an effort to make sure his fallen comrades get a memorial to their service and that survivors of the war on terrorism get a tribute of their own on the National Mall, a place to gather with fellow veterans of the war on terror.
First, he has to persuade Congress to overturn the 1986 Commemorative Works Act, which requires a war to be over for 10 years before a memorial can be built.
The reason: The global war on terror is being fought on multiple fronts around the world and may never end.
That "The global war on terror ... may never end" certainly speaks a basic truth about the age of terror in which we live ... the war on terror, war forever, is widely accepted as our future.
United States of America's veterans of the war on terror are seeing no end to the war on terror in sight. They grow impatient for recognition of their valor in this war even as this war is not over.
Their legal efforts to get a monument built are blocked by laws that assume war ends and builds into law a ten-year period of grace after war before war monuments can be erected.
With no end of war in sight, what to do in the meantime to formally honor the dead of the war on terror?
That understandable query aside, what about the grave danger present in the belief that this war "may never end". Sun Tzu, arguably one of the greatest military philosophers, predicts unending war, war for the sake of war, ends in catastrophe war.
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