29 May 17 I set out Sunday afternoon to photograph one of our military centric cemeteries on our side of Puget Sound in preparation for creating the image for Decoration Day 2017. When we arrived there was a beautiful ceremony underway commemorating those who had given their lives in support of this nation. That put a bit of a crimp on what I wanted to do added to the fact that the grave markers are all flat on the ground and not vertical as is customary in purely military installations. When I got back home and tried to work up an appropriate image to recognize those who have fallen in our defense, I found that the material I had gathered was not of a quality I deemed sufficient. So I went back to a shoot I had done in 2010 at a cemetery with a dedicated section to military and harvested one of those shots for this year. As I looked at the image I thought first about what I had shared last year and how I could do better this year. As I get older I am more and more of the opinion that our country is rapidly forgetting about the what our freedom has cost not only in terms of dollars but in lives. So I took the image and faded it from bright representing now to dark representing those who have long ago paid the ultimate price and in the process have likely been forgotten. That number - of lives sacrificed - is approaching 1.4 million. That number, by itself, may not be as impressive as it should be, so I decided to list the wars by date, name, and the number lost, lest they be forgotten. I've alternated italics just to break them up. I've omitted about a dozen or so with numbers under 10. Should you like to see more, here is a link.
1775 - 1783, American Revolutionary War, 25,000
1785 - 1796; Northwest Indian War, 1,056+
1798 - 1800, Quasi-War, 514
1801 - 1805, First Barbery War, 74
1800 - 1900, Other actions against pirates, 194+
1807 Chesapeake-Leopold Affair, 3
1812 - 1815, War of 1812, 15,000
1813 - 1814, Nuka Hive Campaign, 5
1813 - 1814, Creek War, 875
1815, Second Barbery War, 138
1817 - 1818, First Seminole War, 47
1832, First Sumatran Expedition, 2
1832, Black Hawk War, 305
1835 - 1842, Second Seminole War, 1,535
1846 - 1848, Mexican-American War, 13,282
1847 - 1856, Cayuse War, 41
1851 - 1856, Rogue River Wars, 196
1855 - 1856, Yakima War, 34
1855 - 1858, Third Seminole War, 26
1856 - 1860, Second Opium War, 12
1858, Coeur d'Alene War, 36
1861 - 1865, Civil War, 750,000+
1862, Dakota War of 1862, 70 - 113
1864 - 1868, Snake Indian War, 30
1865 - 1898, Indian Wars,
1866 - 1868, Red Clouds War, 126
1872 - 1877, Modoc War, 56
1875 - 1877, Great Sioux War, 314
1877, Nez Perce War, 134
1878, Bannock War, 12
1879, Ute War, 15
1887 - 1889, Samoan Crisis, 62
1890 - 1891, Ghost Dance War, 35
1898, Spanish-American War, 2,446
1898 - 1913, Philippine-American War, 4,196
1900 - 1901, Boxer Rebellion, 131
1904, Santo Domingo Affair, 1
1910, 1912 - 1925, 1927 - 1933,U.S Occupation of Nicaragua, 159
1914 - 1919, Mexican Revolution, 181
1915 - 1934, Occupation of Haiti, 148
1917 - 1918, World War 1, 116,516
1918 - 1920, North Russia Campaign, 424
1918 - 1920, American Expeditionary Force Siberia, 328
1941 - 1945, World War ll, 405,399
1950 - 1953, Korean War, 36,516
1955 - 1975, Vietnam War, 58,209
1982 - 1984, Beirut Deployment, 266
1990 - 1991, Gulf War, 294
2001 - Present, Afghanistan War, 2,356
2003 -2011, Iraq War, 4,497
It is often stated that there are no atheists in a foxhole; might that be a lesson for us all!
I took the base image and overlaid it with a black to transparent gradient but that's all. Nikon D300s; 18 - 200; Aperture Priority; ISO 640; 1/400 sec @ f /16.