The passion that led to the creation of this book took decades to develop. The time required to create the actual book was less than two years.
In 2007 I signed on as part of a committee that was to lead the effort to build a veterans memorial in Eden Prairie, MN. One of the first things the committee did was to get feedback from each of the members. A few of the questions follow. What did we think the memorial should mean to visitors? What feelings would the visitors experience while visiting the memorial? What feelings might they take home with them?
I really struggled with that. A lot. A year earlier I had visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, ‘the wall’, in Washington, DC, with mixed emotions. I also visited several other memorials there. What was missing? Why did I feel like there was always something missing. Why did I feel like ‘the wall’ was the closest thing to filling the larger void the others left for me.
Then it hit me. We have a lot of veterans memorials dedicated to all veterans as a group. We have ‘the wall’ honoring individual veterans, but only the individuals that died in combat. In and of itself ‘the wall’ does a tremendous job of honoring those that died in combat in that war. What was missing for me was that none of the rest of us were being honored individually.
Why not? Couldn’t this be done? What stopped this from being done in the past? Surely someone had the idea before.
My thoughts went to imagining just the 8.7 million Vietnam veterans and what a memorial of every single one of them would look like. I pictured an area of land, like a huge paved parking lot, with something on it representing each one of us. I pictured it with one nail driven into the pavement for each of us, then with a glass button instead of the nail, and on and on. And then I realized it could never be something that people walked on.
Then I pictured walls along a long path, again with something small representing each of us on it. The more I thought about it the bigger the expense to build it grew. So I tabled the idea of a land based individual memorial for a later date.
I decided to look into creating a web site with an avatar, a graphical representation of a human, for each of us. Every piece of software I used crashed with those large quantities. Also, the enormity of over eight million veterans could not be projected to the viewer on a computer screen.
That’s when I came up with the idea of a book. Why not print a book with an avatar for each of the veterans in it. And why not do that for all of the wars? After all, we are all veterans. At that point I decided to create one large book with an individual representation for each servicemember starting with the Revolutionary War and ending with the current war, the Global War on Terror.
Next, I went to work searching for a list of names of all of the wars, their dates and the number of service members in each war. I searched the Internet and found that a lot of people had reasons to think that they had the most accurate numbers for each war. After reviewing numerous sets of numbers for various reasons for those different numbers, I settled on using the numbers supplied by the U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs (DVA). I figured that most people would agree that the DVA numbers were generally acceptable and accurate numbers.
Now I had the names and dates of each war and the total number of service members participating in each war. Little did I realize the surprise I was about to encounter by totaling the service members of all of the wars. From the beginning of the Revolutionary War, through all of the other wars, and ending in July 2007 partially through the Global War on Terror there was a grand total of 43,266,096 service members. Over 43 million and I wanted to represent each one individually. Wow!
So I opened Microsoft® Word on my PC and went to work creating the first 8 ½” x 11” page. I found a character that looked like a human in a Windows font. The smaller I made the font the less each one looked like a person. In what I considered the smallest acceptable font size I was able to display 3,450 avatars on each page. That meant 12,541 pages in one book. I quickly found out that Word didn’t like that many pages and neither did Windows. They took turns crashing until I became a believer that they couldn’t handle this huge book.
The end result was that I printed the unique pages separately and simply had copies made of the identical pages. Each sheet was three hole punched so that I could use three steel rods to bind them together. I built flexible wooden covers for both ends of the book. Then I placed a cap on both ends of the three foot threaded rods to bind the book and covers together. To give you an idea of how large the ‘big book’ is, a case contains 10 reams of paper and this book was printed on 13 reams.
I brought the ‘big book’ to the flag raising ceremony for the veterans memorial in Eden Prairie to get feedback, reactions and ideas. “Wow!” was the word I heard the most. Jaws dropped in simple amazement of the magnitude of the numbers. I found out later that some veterans just walked away without saying anything because of the strong emotions they felt. Some asked if they could buy a copy. Some suggested I print a condensed version, even if that meant that each veteran was represented by a dot in the book. They just wanted one they could take home.
At first I did not want to even consider representing a veteran with a dot. That just seemed so demeaning or belittling. And yet reproducing the ‘big book’ was just too expensive knowing that my costs were over $500 per book. The effect the ‘big book’ had on veterans and non-veterans alike confirmed to me that the condensed books had to be created.
I did a presentation of the ‘big book’ to a local American Legion Post where I am a member. The result, again, was that it had a profound affect on many veterans. For months I kept receiving positive comments about the book as well as people asking when I was going to make one they could buy and take home. Each person had a different reason to want a book and a touching story to go with it.
People asked what drove me to create the ‘big book’ in the first place. I had to admit that I had a long standing issue with veteran suicides. As Military Policemen in Vietnam, we got to deal with soldiers being pushed over the edge when they received Dear John letters from home. In my view it was so terribly wrong to do that to a soldier who was already living on the edge.
It bothered me a lot whenever I read news reports on how veteran suicides were slightly higher than the national average. I kept wondering how someone, anyone, could commit suicide, much less a veteran who had done so much so that others could live. The last straw was in 2008 when I read that there were eight veteran suicides a day. I’ve thought about that every day since.
World War II was going to be the largest book with over sixteen million veterans. The next largest was the Vietnam War with over eight million. If a book could be produced for World War II then the others, each at nearly half the size or less, would be a breeze.
I proceeded to create a book with about 11,000 dots per page. It ended up being about 1,500 pages long. I then learned that it could not be bound in that thickness so the printers decided to break it into two volumes. Not acceptable! A veteran needed to be able to hold one memorial and know that they were honored in it.
I reduced the size of each dot so that each page then contained 15,340 dots. The book was now under 1,100 pages long and it could be bound in a single volume.
Then one day while talking to a fellow veteran about the ‘big book’, he told me how much it affected him when he first saw it at the flag raising. I explained to him that veteran suicides were a large part of what was driving my passion to get veterans honored individually in a condensed version of the book. He shed tears as he told me that he had attempted suicide years before and was never able to tell anyone before. His heart was still hurting. I changed the dots to hearts.
I knew then that if just telling someone about the book could affect a veteran to that degree then there was no doubt that memorials in the hands of many veterans could do some healing for many more of them. One of the very last feelings a person must have just before committing suicide was that that person must feel all alone. Hopefully this book will have them feel and know that they are never alone.
My hope is that this memorial will help you bring a little peace into each of your lives. For this opportunity, I am honored.