I visited Fort Riley, Kansas for the first time last week and learned so much about how the military trains to advise Iraqi troops (which I will write about later this week).

In addition, the visit was my first introduction to small towns built around military installations, in this case Junction City. In the middle of the town are grand memorials to the soldiers from Fort Riley who have served and died in battle. Most prominently is a memorial reminiscent of the Vietnam Memorial that lists the name of every soldier, sailor, airmen and marine killed in that conflict. That there was a memorial –either on base or in Junction City – to troops killed in World Wars I and II, the Korea War, the and the Vietnam War didn’t surprise me. What did is that military installations are starting to erect memorials for those killed in what the military calls the Global War on Terror (GWOT) or Afghanistan or Iraq.

I thought I would include some photos of the Fort Riley memorial, which is modeled after the World Trade Center towers. Each side of the walls are dedicated to a year, beginning with 2003, and lists the names of those killed. Not surprisingly, each year the list gets longer and the memorial will soon run out of places to put them all. The memorial here is relatively small, as though the planners never anticipated these conflicts would go so long. It was a memorial to the troops, to be sure. But as I looked at the modest granite sculptures, with their dwindling space for names, I thought the memorial somehow captured how many underestimated how long the global war would last.