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NEWS
The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra is one of many local arts organizations requiring proof of vaccination for its shows. | PHUONG BUI
In Forest Park, a Forest of Flags and Memories of War Written by
DANNY WICENTOWSKI
S
tanding ten feet tall each and weighing a combined 24 tons, thousands of agpoles lie planted across Art Hill in Forest Park. If set end to end, the rows would stretch eleven miles, a re ection of the country’s long and terrible road through twenty years of war.
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RIVERFRONT TIMES
It’s a journey that’s only recently concluded with the U.S. formally leaving Afghanistan, though not without adding yet more loss, and more ags. Among the forest of ags is one representing Wentzville-born Lance Cpl. of the Marine Corps Jared Schmitz, one of thirteen U.S. service members killed on August 26 during a suicide bombing attack on the Kabul airport in Afghanistan. This is the third such Flags of Valor event, which has been held every five years at Art Hill since the terrorist attacks of September , . n , on the fifteenth anniversary, the organizers needed only , ags. This year required 7,582. But in this forest of ags, among the faces of twenty-somethings staring out from small photos clipped with dog tags, there is the sound of children. In one row, a little boy, impeccably dressed in a newsboy cap and vest, blows several piercing
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notes on his recorder as his mother, Krystal, snaps photos of the four-year-old from her spot on the grass. He’s too young, of course, to know much about war or what the ags around him mean. But when he’s older, when he does understand, she wants him to be able to see himself in this place. “I just want him to look back on this and see this as something he’s a part of,” she says. “I don’t know what he’s going to be when he grows up, you know? He might want to join the Army. This is something he can look back on and know what it was to experience this, and the people who lost their lives.” he ag memorial goes beyond just military service members. At the foot of the Grand Basin, the ags represent the first responders who perished in the 2001 attacks. Nearby, a woman named Laurie watches her two grandsons, ages
one and four, take turns gleefully blasting a stream of water from the pressurized hose of a fire truck parked onsite. “I just told them that we’re lucky to have people who fight for our country,” she says, describing what she told the two boys as they walked through the ags toward the firefighters and their truck. “They don’t understand a whole lot yet, because they’re so little, but they will someday.” At the top of Art Hill, in the shadow of the statue of King Louis IX, event volunteers Katy Kruze and Debbie Gui assist visitors with finding specific ags at which to pay respects. The feeling of walking through the rows can be a kind of out-ofbody experience, Kruze says. She mentions that she had helped one man locate si ags, all young men he had known and who had died in Afghanistan. “ ou see the ags, and there’s just no words,” Kruze offers. “To
