The American Friends Service Committee is striving to put a price tag on the human cost of the war in Iraq.
The committee put that price tag on display Tuesday in Austin's Zilker Park Peace Grove. The memorial will last until Thursday.
The "Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War" traveling memorial currently consists of 1,462 pairs of empty combat boots, arranged by state in parallel rows resembling the layout of a military graveyard. Each pair of boots represents a soldier who died in Iraq and is marked with a name tag stating the name, age, home state and rank of each soldier.
The memorial, which first opened in January 2004 in Chicago and contained 504 pairs of boots, is constantly evolving, as more pairs of boots are added to the exhibit as the death toll rises.
"As the exhibit travels across the country, families and friends come to grieve for lost loved ones and strangers who gave their lives to a cause far from home," AFSC General Secretary Mary Ellen McNish said in a written statement. "At each stop, people have left notes of commemoration, photographs of lost soldiers, identification tags, flowers and American flags to accompany the boots on their journey."
Also included in the memorial is a display of more than 1,000 other shoes including loafers, flip flops and baby sneakers, and a wall of names and causes of death representing civilian losses in Iraq. Newly added is a display of caps in honor of fallen contractors and the full military regalia of Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Lucey, who returned from Iraq in July 2003 and hanged himself a year later.
"The exhibit is a memorial to all the victims of the Iraq war," AFSC spokeswoman Yvonne Montejano said. "There are the soldiers, the civilians, the contractors and the suicides by Iraq veterans. We are trying to highlight and bring voice to the human and psychological aspects of war."
Although the committee is an organization founded in Quaker values of nonviolence, the exhibit is not necessarily an anti-war statement, according to Montejano.
"We are trying to provide a space for reflection for both sides," Montejano said. "If you're anti-war, you still have to understand the immense sacrifices of our military and their families. If you support the war, you still have to understand the huge human cost involved."
The traveling memorial has already visited more than 40 cities, including New York City during the Republican National Convention and Boston during the Democratic National Convention. The Austin exhibition commenced Tuesday evening with an address by State Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, who is also a Quaker.
"This is a very important exhibit," Burnam said before the event. "It is important to realize the human cost of war. I think it's very compelling, and it's definitely cause for reflection on the costs of war that can't be measured in dollars."
Following Burnam's speech, Austin-area war veterans in full uniform read the names of the 140 Texas soldiers who have died in combat in Iraq, and some local Iraqis and other Middle Easterners who are fluent in Arabic read the names of some of the fallen Iraqi civilians.
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