Few Memorial Days left to win battle with time

Published 11:00 am Friday, June 4, 2004

Of the 140,000 people who flooded the “other Washington” last Saturday for the dedication of the National World War II Memorial, one unknown soldier stands out.

We crossed paths with him in Baltimore Washington International Airport on a flight from Phoenix. As a pack of harried travelers bunched in the aisle behind him, impatient but unusually polite, the crew helped the elderly gentleman to a wheelchair. He was in distinctively military garb; pinned to cap and jacket were dozens of medals.

To the trained eye, those medals charted the course of a 60-year-old war, and the experiences of a young American called to serve. To the rest of the passengers, for whom that story was blurry at best, they announced an old soldier, come to the capitol for what fellow veteran Sen. Bob Dole called “our final reunion.”

For one Review staffer, that reminder of events on the National Mall – the largest gathering of World War II vets since the end of that war – coincided with a memorial pilgrimage of another kind: a last visit to a childhood home soon to be sold. A modest assembling of family and friends at a monument far less grand, it inspired some reflection on the importance of such gatherings – and gathering places – in our lives and memories. Like the “memory houses” of the Victorian age – mnemonic techniques that pictured thoughts as furnishings in a mental mansion, as readily accessible as the bedside telephone – places become points of access to our past. Be they strange or familiar, most places gain their meaning from the experiences we share with others; we return to them, in large part, in order to remember.

When we can’t return yet still need to remember – the twin imperatives that make an occurrence, when experienced on a mass scale, a true “historical event” – we create new places for remembering. These monuments are not just markers, but points of transit and transmission, and a promise that those memories will abide.

The long-overdue National World War II Memorial is such a place, and the weekend of commemorative events may have been the most important three days of that stone and bronze structure’s assuredly long life. Its importance lies not only in the enduring tribute it offers – though that is vital to these veterans and their families – but in its function as a gathering place for a passing generation.

Bainbridge has a unique opportunity to create another such place: the Nikkei Exclusion Memorial planned at the Taylor Avenue road end, site of the ferry dock from which the first Japanese Americans departed for the internment camps in March 1942. Public will and public funds are being marshalled to build the memorial; what’s required now is a more private commitment, from islanders and others, to make it a reality within the lifetimes of the internees. The National WWII Memorial cost some $175 million, almost entirely privately raised; the Nikkei memorial needs only a fraction of that sum, about $4 million, to become reality, but it must be raised in a fraction of the time, as the soldiers and survivors of the war inevitably lose what Sen. Dole called “the battle against time.”

We have confidence that a national memorial honoring the struggle and sacrifice of Bainbridge’s sons and daughters – our grandmothers and grandfathers, our neighbors and friends – will be built. We only hope it will happen in time to be a gathering place for those who gave it such meaning.