As the memorial passes a grim milestone – last month it marked its 5th anniversary – the array of crosses, which is located next to the rowdy Santa Monica pier, has come to serve as a harsh reminder of the cost of war.
Because their time and space is limited, the memorial’s organizers have started laying out rows of red crosses among the white ones, with each red cross representing 10 deaths. Still, it takes them six hours to complete the memorial. A row of boxes in the shape of caskets and draped in American flags -- the military prohibits actual caskets draped in flags from being shown -- line the first row of crosses to represent soldiers who’ve died in the last week.
A radio plays taps in the background to commemorate soldiers killed in the last week, and the 4,209 others.
“We don’t want people to disconnect from the fact that people are losing their lives here,” said Michael Lindley, the president of Veterans for Peace. “We want to get people to understand what the cost of war is all about. When you hear a number, you just hear that number. This way you see that number, and it affects people emotionally.”
Though Lindley and most of the Veterans for Peace volunteers are staunchly against the war and pro-Democratic, they insist the memorial isn’t a political statement, and city officials said they’ve heard few complaints about the display.
The memorial’s location offers an awkward juxtaposition. It’s arranged just north of the pier, and anyone wanting to walk from the pier to the beach has to use the boardwalk that cuts through the crosses.
Many passersby look curiously as the array of crosses as they head for the beach or along the boardwalk, but some are brave enough to approach Lindley. After he explains the memorial’s purpose to one woman, she glances back at the crosses. “Oh!” she says. “That many?”
Lindley watches her walk away. “Did you hear that?” he asks. “Now she knows.”
The location was chosen when “Arlington West” sprung into existence with just a few hundred crosses in February 2004. Chuck Nixon, then the president of Veterans for Peace and currently its treasurer, had heard about a similar memorial in Santa Barbara and thought it sounded like a way to honor the troops without stirring up controversy.
Nixon, who was drafted into the Army in 1965 and served as a medic in Vietnam, built the crosses out of wood and stakes from Home Depot. As discussions with the city turned to where the memorial would be located, Nixon suggested the beach.
Nixon said he was attracted to that spot because it was one of the few places in L.A. that gets a lot of foot traffic. But he admitted that the memorial’s proximity to the pier, where most families head on Sunday’s for a good time, was no accident.
“The fact that it’s a funzone up there and a more somber memorial down here, I think its good for people,” he said. “We want to reach the average American citizens. Being down here, we get all kinds of people who just come to the beach.”
Nixon, who usually arrives at the memorial around 10 a.m., has seen hundreds of families come to pay respects to sons, daughters or friends. But he said he gets most emotional when active duty troops visit.
“It’s hard as a veteran to see these young active duty guys and they’ve either been to Iraq or they’re going,” he said. “The guys that are going, they’re nervous about it. The guys who come back, you just see that look on their face and it’s horrendous.”
One visit in particular sticks out in Nixon’s mind. A little over a year ago, a family had flown in from the East Coast for a wedding. The parents’ son was a Marine, and the family was visiting a cross of a close friend.
Nixon started talking with the son, who was excited to be heading off to Iraq himself in a couple of months.
“I remember seeing this young man, and it wasn’t but three months later that his brother and sister came down and filled out a tag for him. Someone that I saw standing right there, and three months later he got his name on a cross,” Nixon said. “I have trouble talking about it. I looked at that young guy... I know what it’s like to be 20 years old and be sent to a war. I thought I was going to die.”
Though the crosses have grown too numerous for Lindley and Nixon to put individual names on each one, anybody can memorialize a cross for a family member or friend. About a third of the crosses have been visited, and many have flowers or flags stuck into the sand. In front of one cross rests a model helicopter.
To help with the task, volunteers arrive throughout the morning to drop crosses. The earliest volunteer to arrive is always Steve Davis, who met Lindley in 2005.
Davis, who biked past the beach every Sunday morning, would stare curiously at the crosses, but his interest was never more than passing. As he was repairing a flat tire on day, Lindley approached David.
Lindley had been working longer and longer on Sundays to set up the memorial, and he asked Davis where he could get strong tires, like Davis’ bike tires, for a set of carts that could transport the increasingly large number of crosses. Before, Lindley had been taking them all out by had.
“I said, ‘I can make those.’ And then I just kept showing up,” said Davis, who is not a veteran himself.
Now there are half a dozen carts, all stocked with hundreds of crosses. For Lindley, who hasn’t missed a Sunday in three years, the early morning labor is more a duty than a chore. His work is meticulous, with each cross lined up using tape measurers into a neat grid.
The number of crosses to be laid out is always exact. Lindley checks news reports constantly to make sure he has the most updated figures, and he consults a cardboard poster with the previous week’s total to find out how many mock coffins to lay out. On this Sunday, he counts out 4053 to 4071 on his fingers.
“Eighteen,” he finally concludes, and he sets about getting the boxes ready.
“We want people to know that 18 died last, to know if two died last week, if 40 died last week,” he said. “We want this always to be in the forefront.”
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