[BlueTrain]

I've never seen a funeral with boots and helmet and whatnot. However, if you want to see something moving, visit the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington. The momentos that have been left there are will bring you to tears. They build monuments differently these days.

In the days of the Romans they build grand marble arches. That persisted until relatively recently. The biggest one is probably in Paris but there's one at Gettysburg, too. They also liked to build monuments to generals on horseback. Washington has lots of them and they are impressive. Admirals got monuments, too, but without the horses.

These days, monuments have individual names of the soldiers. That's been done for a long time, of course, in the hometown, usually on some piece of granite near the courthouse. Those monuments, which are not particularly monumental, so to speak, eventually are forgotten as the generations pass away and depending on where they are, are sometimes neglected and become overgrown. That even happens in Washington, D.C. But I've never seen another monument like the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial, referring here only to the wall portion.

There is another trend among monuments to wars, or rather to those who fought in wars. The monuments tend to be built starting around thirty years after the end of the war. When soldiers return home they usually are too busy with jobs and families to bother until they are much older. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial was much sooner than that but we do things fast these days.