Opposing the Proposed GWOT Memorial: A Retired Green Beret's Perspective
Howdy y'all,
This article was shared in The Corral yesterday by our great friend, 1avejoe. After reading it I thought it deserved to be here as a dedicated blog post so all of you have a chance to read it and talk about it. Thanks 1avejoe!
-Tex
Retired Green Beret (CW4)
Newly released renderings are giving the public its first look at the planned Global War on Terrorism Memorial on the National Mall. (Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation)
Newly released renderings are giving the public its first look at the planned Global War on Terrorism Memorial on the National Mall. (Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation)Look at these renderings. This is what they want to plant on the National Mall, steps from the Lincoln Memorial: a giant vegetated steel arch curving like a half-circle of grass and ribs, a marble path with boot prints pressed into it, and a shallow reflecting pool they openly describe as an interactive space where visitors step in the water so their temporary footprints can “join” the ones representing our dead and our families.
This is not a memorial. This is therapy cosplay dressed up as national tribute. And it cannot be allowed to stand.
Initially, I considered confining my analysis to the design alone. However, the more closely I examined the proposal, the makeup of the design team, the artist they selected, the significant resources that have already been committed to the project, and the defensive marketing campaign that emerged once public criticism began to surface, the clearer it became that the shortcomings cannot be isolated from those who conceived, promoted, and now defend it. I could no longer address the design in isolation.
I am a retired Green Beret who served thirty-four years. I know what the Global War on Terrorism actually was. It was not a healing journey. It was not a group hug. It was not an opportunity for abstract artists and foundation executives to process their feelings in stone and grass on sacred ground in the capital of the nation we defended.
We went after the people who murdered three thousand Americans on 9/11 because they terrified a nation and we wanted vengeance. We volunteered because we saw the fear in the eyes of our wives, our children, our neighbors, and our communities. I still remember people standing at office windows on September 11th, staring at the skies, waiting for the next plane. That is the memory that should drive any GWOT memorial, not the personal catharsis of one man who left the fight and decided the whole war needed to be rebranded as emotional recovery.
The foundation calls it “The Embrace.” They say the reclaimed war steel covered in living vegetation arches over the earth “in the form of an embrace.” Light filters through, casting shadows that “reveal stories, memories, and moments of connection, even in the darkest places.”
Such language rings hollow when measured against the reality of what we endured. We did not need an embrace from our own capital while we were still bleeding in the Hindu Kush and the streets of Ramadi. We needed the nation to remember that we brought fire and steel to the men who brought fire and steel to us first. This arch does not project power. It does not evoke the raw determination of warriors who hunted terrorists across two decades. It looks soft. It looks like a landscaped amphitheater where civilians can sit on the grass and feel something. In forty years, people will walk past it and ask what it means. Real memorials do not require explanation. The Vietnam Wall does not require a trained volunteer or staff educator who guides visitors through it. The Marine Corps War Memorial does not need a pamphlet. You feel the weight the second you see it. This thing requires a press release and a survey.
The CEO driving this is Michael “Rod” Rodriguez, a retired Green Beret. I respect the uniform. I do not respect what he has done with it here. Rod has been open about his own post-combat journey, the injuries, the rock bottom, the healing through purpose. That is his story. It is not the story of the GWOT. It appears Rod was chosen to lead this effort precisely because his personal emphasis on healing and emotional processing aligns with the softer vision the foundation and its designers have pursued. A man who once lived the warrior life should recognize that this design betrays the very ethos we embodied overseas. Instead, his current direction seems to serve those most eager to build a memorial that prioritizes comfort and reflection over the unyielding resolve that defined our service. He is too close to the fire of his own experiences and has lost sight of how and why we actually lived and fought over there.
Every Green Beret brother I lost in that fight lived as a warrior from the moment he awoke until the day he fell. They conditioned their bodies relentlessly so they could carry a wounded comrade across difficult terrain or close with an enemy in hand-to-hand combat. They maintained their weapons with daily discipline and trained with purpose even during brief periods of rest. There was no passivity in their approach to the mission or to the enemy they hunted. I will not allow their memory to be reduced to something as passive and gentle as an embrace or a landscaped space for casual reflection in our nation’s capital.
Now let us examine every piece of this design as it deserves.
The Embrace / Vegetated Arch
They took reclaimed steel from GWOT vehicles and weapons and turned it into a giant curving structure covered in grass and plants. It forms a semi-circular amphitheater. Some observers have already noted that it resembles a crescent. After 9/11. Let that sink in. The official explanation is that it is “protective” and “communal,” that light and shadow create connection. This is the language of landscape architects and wellness influencers, not warriors. Where is the fury? Where is the determination? Where is the iron resolve that said we will find you and we will end you? This arch does not say that. It says come sit under the plants and process. It is the architectural equivalent of a participation trophy for a war we actually won on the battlefield every time we were allowed to fight it. In forty years this will read as weakness. Our enemies will see it and know we softened. Our children will see it and wonder why the generation that hunted bin Laden and Zarqawi chose to memorialize itself with grass and curves instead of stone and steel that screams never again.
The Path of Honor and the Footprint Puddle
This is the element that should trouble every GWOT veteran and Gold Star family. The foundation describes a marble Path of Honor with footprints pressed into the surface. These footprints, they say, “carry the weight of war and the lived experience of warriors, their families, and the communities who held them.” Visitors are invited to “walk among them, step by step, joining a procession that stretches back across two decades.”
Then comes the shallow reflecting pool. You step into the water. When you step back onto the stone, your own wet footprints appear temporarily beside the permanent ones. The official explanation states that this offers “a quiet act of reconnection with those they love and have lost” and the chance to “walk alongside a loved one once more.”
This is grotesque. War does not leave gentle footprints you can step into for a photo opportunity. War leaves body bags, triple amputees, traumatic brain injuries, and Gold Star children who will never know their father’s voice except from old videos. The weight of war is not something civilians should be invited to play-act by getting their feet wet in a shallow pool on the National Mall. This is not solemn. This is not powerful. This is interactive art therapy that treats the sacrifice of thousands as set dressing for civilian emotional tourism. The explanation is pathetic because it reveals the designers never understood the thing they were supposed to honor. They turned the boots that kicked in doors and patrolled the same roads for years into a whimsical water feature. It dishonors the dead by making their loss participatory and temporary. It dishonors the living by reducing our service to something you can briefly step into and then walk away from when your feet dry.
The 9/11 Relics at the Entrances
They placed steel and stone from the actual attack sites at the three entrances. On paper this sounds respectful. In context it is a fig leaf. The relics are the only part of the design that actually touches the raw nerve of why we fought. Everything else, the arch, the grass, the puddle, the healing language, dilutes that nerve into something polite and abstract. The relics say this is where it started. The rest of the memorial says but let us not be too intense about what followed. That is the insult. We did not prosecute the GWOT with half measures or polite abstractions. We did it with the full weight of American power when politicians let us. A memorial that needs the 9/11 relics to carry the emotional load because the rest of the design is too soft has already failed.
The Overarching Insult: Healing, Reflection, and “Unity” Over Grit and Determination
The foundation’s own words betray them. This is “a living Memorial to an ongoing war, a place to gather, to heal, to connect, and to remember.” It will “invite reflection, healing, and unity for generations to come.” Rod Rodriguez himself frames it around welcoming warriors home and honoring the “invisible wounds.”
We are not sorry for what we did. We are not a generation seeking national group therapy on the Mall. We went overseas because the alternative was waiting for the next attack on our soil while our families looked at the sky. Many of us would do it again tomorrow if the nation asked and the politicians got out of the way. A memorial that centers healing instead of resolve tells the next generation that what we did was something that requires emotional recovery rather than something that requires steel spines and long memories. That is how you lose a civilization, by memorializing your warriors as patients instead of as the shield wall that kept the wolves at bay.
This design risks sending an even more damaging message: that veterans should view their service through a lens of collective regret or the need for national emotional processing. That was never how we lived. On September 12th we were not sorry; we were preparing to fight back with everything we had. Saddam Hussein was pulled from a hole in the ground. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a targeted strike. Osama bin Laden was shot during a nighttime raid deep inside Pakistan. Uday and Qusay Hussein died when the structure they were hiding in was destroyed around them. Senior terrorist leaders were taken into custody and held at Guantanamo Bay. We carried out those operations without apology because that is what our enemies needed to see and that is how we lived. We carry war wounds, but those wounds were earned by following through on the mission we accepted. Framing an entire generation’s service primarily as something that requires mass healing conveys the wrong message to veterans still carrying those wounds and to the nation that sent us. Individual veterans may seek personal healing on their own terms and in their own time. A national memorial on the Mall should instead affirm the righteousness of the cause and the decisive resolve with which it was pursued.
When I stepped outside the wire on every operation, I had already released any sense of self-preservation. I had said my goodbyes to my family before leaving American soil. Once the gate closed behind us, I placed myself in God’s hands and moved with singular intensity, focus, and drive. Every brother beside me did the same. We were not there with sorrow in our hearts. We were there with purpose. We had unfinished business on behalf of the American people, and we executed that business as the unmistakable instrument of national power. Not once did we carry regret or apology into the fight. I carry none today. I signed up to be exactly what our enemies received when they attacked this nation: decisive, unrelenting force. That is the spirit any memorial to the GWOT generation must reflect. The current design replaces that spirit with a call to collective emotional processing and gentle reconnection. It asks warriors to view their service through the lens of healing rather than through the lens of mission accomplishment. That inversion is not honor. It is distortion.
Real memorials honor the living as well as the dead. They make the young want to be worthy of the old. This design makes the young want to book a wellness retreat. It does not inspire. It soothes. We do not need soothing. We need to be remembered as the men and women who saw what had to be done and did it without apology.
What a GWOT Memorial Should Actually Be
It should carry the names, thousands of them, of the fallen, carved so deeply they cannot be ignored. It should contain elements that evoke the grit: the silhouette of a door-kicker, the weight of body armor, the long patrol, the bird on target. It should project the same unyielding determination that took us from the smoking ruins of New York to the mountains of Tora Bora and the streets of Fallujah and beyond. It should make a seventeen-year-old look at it and think, if they could do that, I can do hard things too. It should make an enemy look at it in forty years and understand that America still remembers who attacked it and what price was paid to answer. It should honor the living veterans who still carry the fight in their bones without turning them into case studies in a healing garden.
This proposed design does none of that. It is the product of too many surveys, too much wellness language, and one man’s personal journey projected onto a national canvas. It is abstract because abstraction is safe. It requires explanation because real meaning was never the point. It centers healing because the people driving it needed healing more than they needed to honor the unapologetic warrior spirit that actually won the fights worth winning.
I say no.
As a fellow Green Beret who still believes the GWOT generation fought with honor and pride, I say this cannot be allowed to be built in our nation’s capital. Tear it up. Start over. Or build nothing until someone has the courage to design something that matches the steel in the spines of the men and women who answered the call after 9/11.
Our dead deserve better than a puddle. Our living deserve better than an embrace made of grass and therapy-speak. The nation that was attacked deserves a memorial that still carries the echo of the fury we brought to its enemies, not a landscaped invitation to feel better about what happened.
In forty years, when people stand in front of whatever we allow to be built, they should feel the same thing we felt on September 12th, 2001: resolve. Not confusion. Not gentle reconnection. Resolve.
This design will not be built. We will reject it with the same clarity and resolve we brought to the fight after 9/11. A memorial worthy of the warriors who answered that call will stand in its place, or the ground will remain clear. We are still watching the skies, and we will not yield until the memory of what we did is honored without apology or dilution.
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