“And now, telling you all about it here I can distinctly remember most things, the river, the pub, the cold, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you what he looked like. I can’t see his face anymore.”

These words from Saunders’ story really struck a chord with me. I cannot remember how many times, along many different kinds of media, that I have heard the expression about soldiers not learning much about each other except for each others names because they weren’t going to be around long enough to remember anything of value. I feel like the line from Saunders’ story sort of hits that point. Maybe it was because of the war and the remembering of new faces that he forgot what the creepy guy by the river looked like. So many people died in those wars, I bet it was hard to remember anything about them. They even joke about it early in the play. Joking doesn’t make me feel too good about what kind of people the soldiers are, but since they are fictional I cannot get into an uproar about them. Why is it that soldiers who have been with a company for awhile treat newcomers with zero faith? Maybe the replacement will be a better soldier than the last guy, but I still feel like most of the time the older soldiers have a death wish for the new guys.

Saunders, and many soldiers like him, have trouble remembering faces. I can understand that. War must be hard, especially fighting it with people who you cannot become too attached to. There was no way for those men, nor their families to remember the soldiers how they were.

Let us fast forward the time frame a bit. I found an old story on npr.org. In 2005, students and faculty at the College of Marin in California painted 1,100 5″ x 7″ portraits of soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Additional pictures were painted by students at Syracuse University. Total, around 1,500 portraits of fallen US soldiers were created. The project was called To Never Forget: Faces of the Fallen. I found this project moving, because for no apparent reason, these students and staff undertook the task of helping people remember those soldiers whose faces they cannot remember. They are helping these fallen men live on as heroes for the world to see by showcasing them with their fallen comrades. I feel that more projects like this should be undertaken. I believe it could be used as a powerful tool to show the world the faces of the men that died in order for the rest of us to live free, or protect the ideal of freedom. With the US soldier death tool approaching 4,500, I feel like people need to have their attention drawn to how this war is going. I feel like people are just forgetting those faces whom we have overseas. We cannot forget those faces.

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