Tribute to the fallen

As Joe Mahan sits at a table in Ernie’s Cafe and Steakhouse in Columbia, he sifts through photocopied newspaper clippings about his younger brother Doug. His eyes tear a bit, and he runs his finger over the words and pictures.

A clipping from July 1961 includes a picture of Doug, 17, reaching out to accept a ribbon at the Central Missouri Pony Show. There are news items about Doug receiving the Vice Commandant’s Award at Schilling Air Force Base in Salina, Kan., and about his receiving his silver pilot’s wings in Enid, Okla.

The last picture shows Doug squatting in front of an airplane, helmet resting on his knee. He is smiling. The picture accompanies a 1981 Memorial Day article about his family’s grief.

Maj. Douglas F. Mahan’s airplane was shot down April 20, 1970. Doug was listed as missing in Southeast Asia until April 1977, when he was listed as killed in action. A month later, his family attended a Memorial Day ceremony to dedicate Columbia’s Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial at the Boone County Courthouse.

Doug’s name was on the stone, as was the name of his childhood friend Jerry D. Basnett. The light gray tablet feels like fine sandpaper. It bears no other inscription than Vietnam 1963-1973, with 26 names inscribed on the stone in inch-high letters.

An inevitability of war is that people die. Although gravestones might mark the death of civilians, soldiers are memorialized in marble, granite and concrete.

Individuals tuck memories between the pages of books or in boxes underneath the bed; memorials are where the nation keeps its memories. Concepts such as freedom and sacrifice are difficult to grasp, but memorials hold them in stone and use words and imagery to communicate the abstract.

On the last Monday of May each year, citizens come before stone memorials and gather at cemeteries to remember the soldiers who died and those who remain.

Five stone memories, immovable and gray, are outside the Boone County Courthouse. The names stretch over 100 years; they are the names of neighbors, friends, siblings, sons and daughters. The memory of an individual is behind each name.

Even before the end of World War I, students at MU were trying to find a way to memorialize their classmates who had gone to fight. Memorial Union is where the living placed their memories of the dead.

At the Boone County Courthouse, citizens raised a memorial to the Boone County men who paid the supreme sacrifice in the Great War. They placed a statue of an American doughboy atop the gray stone and inscribed the words, “In memory of Boone County Boys who lost their lives in the World War 1917-1918.”

Without memory as a guidepost, society would not know where it has been or where it is going. Memory defines the present and shapes the future.

“If we didn’t remember things, we would just be living in an eternal present,” says Keith Eggener, an art history professor at MU. “We wouldn’t ever learn anything. We would not have any character development; we would have no sense of purpose. We would live in a constant, eternal, rather meaningless present.”

The difference between a monument and a memorial is the difference between inspiration and reflected tragedy. In Washington, D.C., the Washington Monument towers in the triumph of independence won while the Lincoln Memorial recalls a broken and sorrowful nation.

Joe and Doug Mahan’s parents, J.B. and Alliene Mahan, attended the Memorial Day services at the Boone County Courthouse and at the cemetery until their deaths.

“My wife and I used to go on vacation, and one year we didn’t make it back in for Memorial Day, and my was dad just mad as hell,” Joe says.

The Mahans have been shaped by their memory of Doug. Until Doug’s mother died, she kept hoping her son would return from Vietnam. When returning veterans were shown on television, she scanned the faces looking for Doug.

Doug was a farm boy who wanted to fly, earned good grades and once made his brother Joe drive to a restaurant to return a salt and pepper shaker that one of their friends had pocketed.

“It’s not one of those things that he was off and on about,’’ Joe says. “From the time he was 7 years old he wanted to fly planes. When he was 7 years old he had to wear glasses — I mean his eyes were bad — thick glasses, and he wanted to be in the Air Force so bad that he would take eye exercises every night for two or three hours to strengthen his eye muscles. When he got in high school and college, his eyes were perfect.”

When Joe visits memorials and sees his brother’s name, he feels sad, proud and humble. His brother’s name is on stone memories in Columbia, in Oklahoma, on the wall in Washington, D.C., and on the moving wall that travels around the country.

The nation’s memorials have been built in the images of the citizen’s feeling toward a particular war. As remembrances to soldiers have been built, national myths have developed. The world wars are remembered as noble causes, but Vietnam is remembered as a deeply unpopular and divisive moment in our history.

Many scholars say they think that the national Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial was a turning point in the way the nation recalls war. Designed by Yale undergraduate Maya Lin and dedicated in 1982, the wall offers no statement on the cause of war, but allows visitors to stand before the name of each American soldier killed in the Vietnam War.

“You know what you’re supposed to think when you see the Iwo Jima memorial,” Eggener says. “You don’t know what you’re supposed to think when you see the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial.

“It’s like this open book, but it’s quite vague; it’s just this black reflective wall. You can kind of see yourself — your own reflection is cast in the wall next to all those thousands of names, and what are you supposed to do with it? Is it meant to be tragic, is it meant to be reflective, is it meant to be any number of things? The answer is ‘Yes.’ It’s meant to allow you to come to your own terms with that event.”

There are 26 names on the speckled gray tablet memorializing the Vietnam veterans in Columbia. There are 58,245 names on the wall in Washington. When communities carve the names of their lost soldiers in stone, they say to themselves and to the world, “These people were ours, here they were young and dreamed of life, here remain people who loved them and whom they loved, here we remember.”

No matter what name Dewey Riehn sees when he looks at memorials, eventually his mind drifts to the name Frank P. Stanley. Riehn is a retired chief warrant officer and a Vietnam veteran. He is also a lobbyist and advocate for veterans in Jefferson City.

“Frankie and I were assigned to the same team the first part of November in ’68 and he celebrated his 20th birthday in January of ’69,” Riehn says. “He was 19 when I first met him, and then he was killed in August.”

As Riehn stands in front of the Boone County Courthouse memorials, he is wearing a black and white baseball cap with the letters, “P.O.W.” and “M.I.A.” across the front and the words, “You are not forgotten,” across the bill.

“I’ll pick out the name David B. Murray up there,” he says while pointing to the World War II memorial. “I know that was an individual who had hopes and dreams and had family and had people that cared about him and people that he cared about, had aspirations in life because I remember my partner. He had all those things and he was 20 years old when he got killed and he never got to realize those things.”

For Riehn, memorials are always about the individual.

“They shouldn’t glorify war,” he says. “There was nothing glorious about the second World War, but we should remember the people that did it and made the sacrifices, and I think that’s what memorials do.”

In 1977, seven years after the government said Doug was missing, the Mahans were told that fragments of a plane and pieces of a flight suit had been found. The type of missile that hit Doug’s plane made it unlikely that there was anything left.

The Mahans have never believed that the remains they buried in Memorial Park Cemetery were Doug’s. So much time had passed since he was shot down and there was just too little to be sure of any identity.

“They said they found remains,” Joe says. “Like my dad said, ‘We don’t think they are, but we’re not to say. But if they’re remains, they’re of somebody else’s son and they need to be buried, too.’”

Remembering, to Joe and to his family, is the right thing to do. Joe and his wife have all the pictures; they have Doug’s graduation and scholarship certificates and his purple heart. As a means of memorializing Doug, the Mahans created a scholarship fund for Air Force ROTC cadets at MU.

Joe and his wife don’t always make it to the Memorial Day ceremonies in Columbia any more, but they say it’s important to honor the day and the people involved.

“Quite often, my wife and I will stop up there and look and walk around up there,” Joe says, gesturing in the direction of the Courthouse. “It’s the thing to do.”

The memorials in front of the Boone County Courthouse are set apart from sidewalk traffic in a small oval plaza. Although the music from the stereo at Boone Tavern can be heard, the memorials remain a still, quiet place.

Molly Chadderdon and Alicia Seewald, both 20, were in town to see a concert at The Blue Note and paused to see if their last names were on the memorials. From Minnesota and enjoying their first road trip, the girls didn’t expect to see any names they recognized, but they still stopped to look.

“I think it’s important,” Seewald says. “These people died serving our country.”

Earlier in the week, David Martin paused in front of the memorials after lunch at Boone Tavern. When he looks at the stones, he thinks about how young the soldiers were and the sacrifice they made. Martin calls war a last resort, but believes that it is sometimes necessary.

“Hopefully we can learn from it and not make those same mistakes again,” he says.

Lt. Cmdr. Kirk Wallace, a senior instructor of the Army ROTC at MU, has served in the Army for 22 years. He said it is important to acknowledge that the sacrifices soldiers have made might be the reason the nation stands today. He says soldiers have helped shape the future.

“The memorial itself shouldn’t be a historical rendering of the war, but a remembrance and way to pay tribute and respect to the fallen soldiers, men and women,” he says. “It should be a way to trigger us to go back and review history and go, ‘What was that war all about?’

“If we keep it fresh, if we keep reminding ourselves, if the veterans come and talk to us during these famous days, we’ll remember how horrible war really is, and why it should be a last resort and keep everything in perspective.”

The cost of war is human life; lives lost and lives changed forever. Citizens will always question whether it is right to go to war; they are willing to question the governments who send the soldiers. Citizens continue, however, to raise memorials to those who did not come home, they continue to remember their neighbors through marble, granite and concrete.