Mount Soledad

My wife and I made it a point to visit the Mount Soledad Veteran's Memorial while we were out in San Diego earlier this week. The memorial itself had been the target of a relentless lawsuit that was finally resolved by the transfer of the memorial to the Federal government. Unfortunately, another suit was promptly filed by the ACLU, this time against the Department of Defense. So it isn't over yet.

The park the memorial is in provides a fantastic view of the San Diego area. It is a beautiful location. The memorial itself has a series of concentric walls where individual, engraved black granite plaques are displayed. There is space for about 3,200 plaques and about 2,100 are already displayed there. My wife and I were fortunate enough to run into one of the trustees of the memorial while we were up there. Mac is a veteran of the Second World War and served aboard the USS Ajax (AR-6).

Mac and his wife, Nona, talked about the memorial, the lawsuit and a constant running battle with defacement of the monument by vandals. Whether the vandalism is politically motivated or just being done by morons, Mac couldn't say. Mac showed me his plaque on one of the walls. My wife and I also helped Mac take down and fold the flag that flies at the memorial.

One of the "solutions" to the cross controversy that the ACLU is proposing is to sell the land the cross sits on to the highest bidder. One woman we spoke to feared that the property, with its magnificent view, would be snapped up for a home at an obscene price that nobody (certainly not the Memorial Association, at any rate) could match - thereby eliminating public access to that view. One has to wonder if that is not the motivation of at least some of the opponents of the cross.

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  By Sylvia, Friday, 31 August , 2007 @ 4:21 pm

  Gaius, thank you for reporting about this. I especially liked the husband-wife plaques. It boggles my mind that some people cannot see how valuable memorials like Mount Soledad are to our culture.

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