FORT BRAGG, N.C. — When the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division dedicated a memorial to paratroopers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, organizers believed three sides of a wide granite column would be plenty of space to engrave the names of the fallen.
Three years later, there is no more room.
The last name on the memorial belongs to Sgt. Clayton G. Dunn, who was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in May 2007. To accommodate the rising number of casualties, military officials have been forced to expand the memorial by adding a granite wall.
The wall now has 50 new names, each a grim reminder that a 13-ton granite tower vastly underestimated how much space it would take to honor the fallen.
“We can put on as many as we need to now,” said retired command Sgt. Maj. Roger Vickers, who served for 14 years in the 82nd. “The hope is we don’t ever have to put another name on it at all.”
The United States has lost more than 4,000 soldiers in Iraq and 800 in Afghanistan since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The 82nd lost 62 paratroopers in 2007, more than in any other year since the wars began. Three separate incidents in Iraq last year each claimed the lives of seven or more paratroopers from the 82nd.
The 82nd isn’t the only division squeezed for memorial space. A memorial at Fort Hood in Texas honoring fallen soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division — which lost 174 soldiers between the end of 2006 and 2008 as several of its brigades served in Iraq — is filling up, said Dennis Webster, executive director of the 1st Cavalry Division Association. The names of future soldiers who die in service will have to be engraved on the back side, Webster said.
