When I stepped off of the C-17 onto the Kandahar Airfield tarmac back in 2017, I unexpectedly encountered a little-known but moving memorial that honored our country’s fallen. It sat tucked away in the reception hangar, and captured my attention as I made my way to the back to pass through customs.
It wasn’t any sort of loftiness or grandiosity that made it so moving, but its simplicity. It was a long, billboard-like bulletin board, upon which were pasted thousands of photos of fallen service members. The pictures were neatly organized into a large grid, and under each photo was the service member’s name. The pictures sat in chronological order by date of death, illustrating the sum total of American sacrifice overseas since the beginning of the Global War on Terror. And as with the photos of two fellow paratroopers who had just recently lost their lives a little over a month earlier, additions were made as they regretfully became necessary.
“Never forget,” the memorial reminded my company, using words with a significance that older Americans may understand. I fear they may not bear the same significance for the post-9/11 generation, those 18-year-old service members now walking through that same hangar in southern Afghanistan as they begin their own combat deployments.
I have to admit, I myself don’t have much of a personal memory of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that sent us to war. While many Americans vividly remember that day, I always felt a sort of shame for having learned about them secondhand. I was just 4 years old, still cognitively detached from the world around me. I don’t remember the shock, the pain, the anger of that day.
Today, I can only imagine what it must have been like. Unlike many of the soldiers I served with 16 years later, I learned of the attacks from asking my parents, reading news articles, and watching documentaries. In a way, I always felt like I was learning about a past era, similar to when I read about Pearl Harbor in the sixth grade, despite the attacks having occurred in my lifetime.
Yet, despite all of the articles I read, videos I watched, and speeches I heard regarding this world-changing event, it was only when I unexpectedly ran into that Kandahar memorial after having left home in North Carolina just a few days earlier that I genuinely, personally understood what it was that I was supposed to “Never Forget.”
“Never forget” the lives taken far too early, the lives given far too freely, and the high price of the American ideals of peace and liberty, which is, as we are reminded of today, far too costly.
However, public memory is short, especially when it is asked to span generations. Thus, as 9/11 inevitably recedes further into history and younger Americans inherit our world, the preservation of such memories becomes all the more important.
We already have beautiful memorials to the victims of these attacks in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, which personally remembers each one, name by name. Yet a monument honoring the sacrifices of those who gave everything in response to the attacks is still in the making.
Just a couple of years ago, Congress approved a proposal for a Global War on Terror memorial, waiving the normal requirement that the conflict be ended for 10 years because of the indefinite nature of our current conflict. Knowing the care put into such memorials around our nation, I have immense faith and trust in the GWOT Memorial Foundation as it decides the design of the monument. However, as a member of the younger generation to recently participate in the war they are memorializing, despite not personally remembering its catalyzing event, I suggest that it be made personal, such as the Vietnam War Memorial and the makeshift memorial I witnessed in Kandahar Airfield.
That way, we memorialize not just the event, but the people who took part, so that as generations pass, they remember the individual human sacrifice of this era and truly understand what we mean when we say “Never Forget.”
Kevin Carl Petersen is a student at Columbia University and a veteran of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan.
