Veterans Park Veterans Memorial

I'd not taken the time to closely look at the new Veterans Memorial in Veterans Park til today. There are paver stones on which the names of local veterans are engraved. Or notes from loved ones.

I don't quite know for sure what I think of the part of the memorial where the engraved paver stones end up at a pair of what I assume are intended to represent caskets.

The casket on the left, at the point where the pavers meet the casket, the engravings were for several Choctaw Code Talkers from World War I. I knew about the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II, but I'd never heard of Choctaw Code Talkers.

In a Burger King in Kayenta, Arizona, on or near the Navajo Nation, there is a museum, as part of the Burger King, that tells the story of the Navajo Code Talkers. That was the first I'd ever heard of them. That was in the early 1990s. Since then their story has become well known, via movies and I think a memorial other than the one in a Burger King.

There were pavers for soldiers from the current Iraq war, the previous Iraq War, Vietnam, Korea, both World Wars. And the Civil War. Two from the Civil War. I thought that was interesting. Jack Tankersley and James I Brewton, Civil War Confederate.

When I first came to Texas, we went out to Weatherford, we were walking around the county courthouse, which looked cool to our northwest eyes. And then there was a statue, a statue memorializing the War Between the State and the Confederacy. It was at that point that for the first time I realized, yikes, I'm living in a Confederate state. At the time this seemed significant. Now, not so much.

Cemeteries in Texas are very interesting to a person who grew up in the northwest. Washington only became a state in 1889. Prior to the 1850s there weren't a lot of people other than Indians living in Washington. So, if you walk around even the oldest cemeteries in Washington, like the one in the small town of Rosyln, you see some very intriguing gravestones, it's got something like 20 sections, divided by everything from religion to nation to race.

But, in a Washington cemetery you don't see anyone buried that was born in something like 1799. I never saw such a thing til I was in Texas. Texas cemeteries are like walking through a museum. If' you've not walked around the cemetery by the Dallas Convention Center and Pioneer Plaza, well, it's worth a walk. It also has the biggest Civil War monument I've seen. I think Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and I forget who else are on it.

I've got to remember to blog about an interesting, pretty much hidden, war memorial that I came across in the Fort Worth Botanic Gardens. I took pictures and then forgot about it.