Why there are no veterans names in these books!
There aren't any names in any of these veterans memorial books. Lots of people have asked why. After all, that would be the least one could ask for on a memorial in their honor.
There are several reasons for not having names in these books. First, my motive all along with these memorials was to treat all veterans exactly alike. That meant treating those living exactly as those that died and treating those were wounded exactly like those that died and those who weren't wounded. It also meant treating the veterans of one war equal to those of each of the other wars. It also meant treating the males and females exactly alike. It also meant treating the combat veteran exactly the same as the veteran who wasn't involved in combat. Those that were in the war theatre are treated exactly the same as those who didn't leave U.S. soil. Those that were in the infantry are treated the same as those that were in finance. Every single veteran treated exactly as every other veteran, no matter how unequal the service or how unequal the sacrifice.
While creating the 12,622 page book I contemplated using all 43,277,096 names. The issue of locating all of the veterans names of each of the wars in itself was a challenge. Who would have names for the American Revolutionary War and any of the other earlier wars? Were records even kept back then, especially before we were actually a country? Would the Dept of Veterans Affairs (DVA) release the names for this? Did they even have all of them? What if some were missing? And if they had the names could they release them without individual approval from each of the veterans? What if DVA approved the release of the names as long as I got individual approval of each veteran? What if some refused to have their names in these books?
The issue became a moot point when I went to figure out how big the books would be. Because World War II had the greatest number of veterans I used it as the test book. According to several print shops book binding equipment had a limit of somewhat less than 1,200 pages. I crunched as many dots onto a page as I could. The first book had 11,000+ dots on a page when I sent it out for quotes on how much it would cost to have it printed. The quotes came in with one quote for the first half of the book and another quote for the second half. The printers had divided the book in half because it was too big to bind into one. Unacceptable! A veteran of World War I could hold one book and know that they were honored in that book. A World War II veteran would not know which book they were honored in. Simply unacceptable! World War II must be one book, one memorial!
By using a 5 point font I was able to put 15,340 dots on a page and thereby crunch all of the 16,112,566 dots into 1,064 pages which could be bound into a single book. Each page looked like a screen and blurred quickly. To give the eye something to focus on a US flag watermark was added to the background of each page.
Now I had the size of the book with dots. What about names? Several items needed to be considered. First, the names needed to be printed in a 10 point or larger font in order to be read easily. Second, a conservative average of 20 characters per name, which included first, middle and last name, was used as a starting point. A quick test revealed that about 250 names could be printed on each 8 1/2" X 11" page. At 250 names per page the World War II memorial would be 64,450 pages long. That meant it would take 6 or more books to list all of the names of the World War II veterans. Who would purchase 6 books? Who could afford them? Getting lots of these memorials out to lots and lots of veterans would not happen with that scenario.
Note: Taking the big book, with 12,622 pages, and replacing each avatar with a name would result in a book of at least 173,000 pages of names. It would use 173 reams of paper or more and would be about 13 times larger than the largest book in the world. It would be almost 40 feet thick and would weigh over 1,000 lbs.