California war memorial may outgrow its home

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — It looks like an engineer's dream: rows and columns of white wooden crosses a foot-and-a-half high, each cross exactly 36 inches from its neighbor, each row exactly 60 inches from the next, a reckoning of combat death gleaming on the Santa Barbara beach.

Each cross in the display mounted every Sunday represents a U.S. military death in Iraq. At its start three years ago, the project had 340. The number now tops 2,840.

In a telling comment on the war's unexpected duration, organizers of the memorial, Arlington West, are talking about picking a number — perhaps 3,000 — and building no more crosses after it's reached.

"It's strictly a matter of logistics; there's just a limit to how much room we can take up and how many crosses we can handle," said Dan Seidenberg, president of the local chapter of a group called Veterans for Peace. "I mean: How long will this war drag on?"

About a dozen volunteers, some veterans, have shown up week after week since the beginning.

On a recent Sunday morning, Rod Edwards, an engineer for Goleta Water District, walked down the rows, securing laminated, handwritten nameplates, using two rubber bands per cross.

"You almost feel you know them after a while," said Edwards, who volunteers for the task each week. "It just tears your heart out."

Not long ago, Edwards said, he comforted a sailor who had dropped by to seek the name of his buddy.

"He seemed fine at first," Edwards said. "But when he saw the name, he just lost it. He threw himself on the sand and cried."

When the crosses are taken down about eight hours later, the nameplates are filed away just so, allowing Edwards and other volunteers to honor requests that troops who died together be grouped side by side. One such grouping has 17 crosses. One family asked for a Star of David instead of a cross; that request also was honored.

Stephen Sherrill, a Santa Barbara carpenter, started Arlington West with half a dozen friends as a protest.

He still checks a Web site each week for fatalities, still buys the lumber with donated money, still glues and screws the appropriate number of crosses.

"I plane the wood and curve the edges now," he said. "People were getting too many cuts and splinters."

Arlington West has inspired about a dozen similar installations around the United States. Except for a few rainouts, the Santa Barbara display has been erected every Sunday since Nov. 2, 2003.

On a recent Sunday, volunteers started arriving about 7:30 a.m. They started hauling crosses lashed together in bundles of 16 from a donated truck.

Hundred-foot measuring tapes were laid across the sand and stretched taut. People dropped each cross at a spot marked in red on the tapes.

Behind them came others to plant the crosses firmly in the sand, still others to straighten them and yet others to stick miniature U.S. flags beside each marker.

A man in a straw hat raked the sand between the crosses. He likened it to grooming a Zen garden.

As the day wore on, mourners came by, kneeling amid the crosses. Volunteers offered kind words and flowers.

On the wharf, tourists leaned on a railing and peered down at the scene. A recorded bugle played taps over and over.

At day's end, volunteers fanned out among the crosses, pulling them up as meticulously as they had put them down.

The display has angered some.

A debate over its propriety recently flared in the letters columns of the Santa Barbara News-Press, with some writers saying it exploits fallen heroes for political gain.

Last year, a Lompoc mother, Debbie Argel Bastian, demanded that the name of her son, Air Force Capt. Derek Argel, be removed because he wouldn't want to be associated with an anti-war protest.

The organization complied.