A century later, state truly honors WWI fallen
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields. —
In Arizona, we broke the faith. For years, our memorial to World War I has been ... how shall I say it? ... an absolute disgrace.
For years, it has stood there across from the state Capitol at Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza, forlorn and forgotten. A thief long ago made off with the plaque that once adorned this 6-foot granite marker, leaving two stark holes where a bronze medallion once was mounted.
It’s been that way for a decade, or perhaps longer.
For a decade, or perhaps longer, Arizona’s memorial to World War I has stood mostly as a monument to the fact that we haven’t kept the faith. Not only has this 50-year-old memorial fallen into disrepair, there’s just not much to it.
There is nothing there to tell the story of the war that marked the first real test of America’s strength as a world power. Nothing to honor the 4 million Americans who served or the 116,516 American soldiers who fought and died “over there,” including 321 Arizonans killed in action.
There was talk in 2009 about fixing up the memorial and adding to it, but nothing came of it.
Until now.
This weekend, on the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, Arizona will at long last be ready once again to honor those long-ago warriors.
This, thanks in large part to Arizona’s veterans.
They, better than anyone, understand the need to never forget. And so they teamed with the state departments of Administration and Veterans Services to finally fix and upgrade our disgrace of a monument.
“Remembering is part of the honoring process,” David Lucier, who served as a Green Beret in Vietnam and now is president of the Arizona Veterans and Military Leadership Alliance, told me. “There’s nobody left in that generation to remember. So we have to do it for them.”
By Sunday, an enlarged replica of the original bronze medallion — featuring the poppy that came to symbolize the war and remembrance — will be added to the monument. And on either side, brass plaques that eventually will sit on granite pedestals: one telling the story of World War I, another with poet John McCrae’s haunting words, written so long ago beside a Belgian battlefield.
In Flanders fields, he wrote: the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields ... A hundred years ago Sunday, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, America’s “War to End All Wars” was over.
Arizona’s memorial to the Great War will be rededicated at a public ceremony at 11 a.m. Sunday, Veterans Day. Or, as it once was known, Armistice Day. Come and keep the faith. “Maybe,” Lucier said, “we’ll have a big turnout.” The memorial is being restored and upgraded thanks to a grant from the World War I Centennial Commission’s 100 Cities/100 Memorials project. The Unified Arizona Veterans and its members raised additional funds. The Arizona Veterans and Military Leadership Alliance and the Arizona Military History Museum designed the expansion elements, and the construction costs were a gift from the Sundt Corp. and Sundt Foundation.