The process of erecting the Iraq War Flag Memorial was only supposed to take two days. Students began setting up the flags on the Sunday before the end of Thanksgiving break, and the memorial was supposed to have been completed by the end of the first day of school. Thus, the work of setting up the flags would have essentially been finished by the time most students got settled into the rhythm of school once again.
But the fact that the process ended up being extended for a few more days was a piece of good fortune. The gods must have smiled on the project and stretched it out for us. They must have seen that the best part of the project was not the completion of the vast, awesome sea of markers but the process of sticking little, rusty, plastic flags into the ground.
Planting the flags was an opportunity for me to think about the war in unexpectedly personal ways. Newspaper articles and coverage on TV can communicate the latest tragedies of the war in a remarkably detailed and immediate manner. But strangely, grasping an utterly inhuman white plastic flag in your hand can be more powerful.
The flags’ blankness and inexplicitness provide a clean slate for the imagination. And imagination can be both more powerful and more personal than an explicit story or image. At certain moments, while I was jabbing metal flag-stems into the freezing ground, one of the flags would look up at me with the face of an old sweetheart and my heart would crack. It would crack for the face of a young boy who was loved as deeply as I had ever loved and for the heart that loved him. Suddenly, I was not mourning for a mass, but for a single person, and only then did the tears come. Yet after that moment, the horror of the massiveness of the thing became clearer to me. If every flag had a face as precious as the one I had just mourned, the field was a field of tears, a field of unbearable cramping in the pit of the stomach.
The physicality and immediacy of the flags somehow turns the unfathomable concept of over one million deaths into something tangible, something engaging. In front of the TV, you can only watch passively as the images float by, but you are there with the flag. You can feel the rust on its stem, the crinkly slipperiness of the plastic. You have the power to bend it, crush it, kiss it, if you like.
I experimented. Sometimes, I would jab the flags into the ground with a sort of impatient nonchalance. With the entire field stretched out before me and endless boxes of flags still left to be planted, I felt like I was getting nowhere. Often, when I decided to call it quits because my fingers were about to freeze, you couldn’t tell I had even covered any ground. At times, it seemed like the goal was to get as many flags in as possible and that I was essentially nothing in this process  at least nothing more than one assembly line worker next to another. It was appropriate, I thought, for my work to be invisible. It emphasized, even more strongly than the sight of the sea of flags did, how vast the number of deaths was and how little one person mattered in the scheme of this massive carnage.
At other times, though, I would pause and take the time to unfurl each little white flag, smoothing out its wrinkles. I would almost caress each one before I put it into the ground as if the white plastic were the skin of a beloved face. “Stop,” I would tell myself. “This memorial is not about you. It’s about the awe-inspiring expansiveness of the result.” But then I would ask myself, “Is it really better to jab each flag impatiently and absent-mindedly into the ground, trying to just get it done, or to do this with an attitude of reverence for the dead?”
Since the goal of the project involves cultivating a sort of somber awareness of the suffering of humanity, I think the latter approach is more appropriate. For me, the experience of planting each flag lovingly into the ground is more powerful than simply looking at the assemblage of flags on Ankeny field. It is a way to make the war come closer to my skin, which I see as the main goal of the project.
I hope that, in the three days of school during which the flags were being planted, many of you were able to feel the war against your skin and against your heart as I did. I hope that even planting one flag at the request of community peace activist Buddy got some of you to feel the presence of a dead soul in your hand. Only by experiencing the personal and the particular can we come to understand the horror of the mass.
