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Honoring disabled vets

Work will begin on a new Washington, D.C., memorial in November that will honor all disabled American veterans past and present.

Actor, veterans advocate and memorial spokesman Gary Sinise is scheduled to speak at the groundbreaking at 10:30 a.m. on Nov. 10 on the 2.4-acre triangular site at Washington Avenue SW and 2nd Street SW across from the U.S. Botanic Garden.

The American Veterans Disabled for Life Memorial is the culmination of a decades-long effort by Disabled Veterans’ LIFE Memorial Foundation co-founders Lois Pope, a Palm Beach, Fla., philanthropist, and Arthur Wilson, a Vietnam veteran and chief executive officer of the 1.2 million-member Disabled American Veterans.

It will be “the nation’s first and only permanent public tribute to the over 3 million living disabled American veterans and the countless hundreds of thousands who have died,” according to the foundation’s news release announcing the groundbreaking.

With a star-shaped granite reflecting pool at its center, surrounded by three walls of laminated glass and four bronze sculptures, the foundation hopes the memorial will “convey an interplay of strength and vulnerability, loss and renewal ... the universal story of the disabled veteran’s call to service, trauma, challenge of healing and discovery of purpose.”

Pope conceived of the memorial after visiting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and realizing there was nothing similar for disabled veterans. She had visited years before with disabled veterans at New York University’s Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine.

“I thought back to those veterans I met at the Rusk Center lying there, some with no arms, some with no legs, and in a flash it hit me,” she said. “Far too often, they are marginalized and forgotten. This memorial will ensure that they and their sacrifices will always be remembered, while educating future generations about the human cost of war.”

— Staff report