Army Sgt. Ryan Baum: Panel 19, column 2, row 34. The 27-year-old Aurora soldier was killed in 2007 in Karmah, Iraq, when his unit was attacked by small arms fire. He was killed six hours before he was scheduled to return home to see his wife and greet his daughter, who was born 11 days later .
Baum is one of 29 from Aurora who are honored on the Colorado Freedom Memorial, a jagged array of 12-foot-high glass panels, etched with nearly 6,000 names of Colorado service members who died or went missing during combat.
It’s quiet except for the F16s that come over every now and then from Buckley, says Rick Crandall, the Aurora resident who spearheaded the memorial. “It’s peaceful, most of the time, especially at night when the sun sets,” he says.
The memorial sits just across the way from Buckley Air Force Base on four acres at Springhill Park near East Sixth Avenue and Telluride Street. You can hear crickets chirping in the nearby brush and the occasional prairie dog popping out of a hole in a mound of dirt on the grass that pads the memorial.
Crandall is humble when he talks about a memorial that took him more than a decade to build. After fits and starts, the 95-foot-long structure officially opened to the public in February 2013.
“We’re kind of like a smorgasbord, paying as we go here,” he says and points to how the water isn’t running through the channel at the tiled granite base of the glass panels. The artist who designed the trough created it to represent the oceans that separate Colorado from the fields of battle overseas.
Last September, when Aurora flooded, some of that tile was cracked. Randall says the contractor is still working on repairing and replacing it.
The memorial is the first of its kind in the country. It includes Colorado service members from all military branches and wars, stretching back to the Spanish-American War of 1898.
“Half of them never came home,” Crandall explains of the names etched in white, which gives them a translucent quality. “That’s 3,000 people who never came home. For a lot of those families, this becomes their grave site, the place they never had to go grieve.”
The names are not listed in alphabetical order though they are grouped by war. Crandall says the memorial was designed to reflect war’s chaos.
“It’s not an orderly point A to point B kind of thing,” he explains. “The panels of glass you see falling back and forth are meant to represent men and women falling in action.”
One panel set back from the others includes the names of those who served in Vietnam. The artist, Kristoffer Kenton, wanted to convey the sense that Vietnam, the last war where the U.S. military used the draft to recruit soldiers, deeply divided the country.
Crandall’s design contribution to the memorial are the peaks that form between the shiny metal beams that connect the panels. “I had this romantic notion that the last thing a lot of these men and women saw before they left was those mountains,” he says.
“This is the panel, when you come out here, you’ll find people standing in front of often,” he says of Panel 19, the same one Ryan Baum’s name is etched on. “This is the panel for soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
iCasualties.org, a website that tracks deaths and injuries among coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, shows from 2003 to 2012, 4,486 U.S. military members died serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It shows from 2001 to 2014 that 2,342 U.S. military members died serving in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
“We still lose them,” Crandall explains. “There are new families, and we become acquainted with those families, unfortunately and fortunately. Some of the great people I know are the parents of these kids, whose only wish is that we just don’t forget.”
Crandall, a U.S. Air Force veteran and radio talk show host, has dedicated an almost superhuman effort to funding the memorial. This is despite never having lost a loved one to war.
He had the idea to honor the Colorado soldiers in 2000, but after 9/11, plans fell by the wayside as the nation was grieving and at the same time gearing up to go to war. The plans were postponed for a few years and then the economy tanked, inhibiting people from donating money.
Originally, the plan was to construct a $2 million memorial as part of a 140-acre parcel of land the city has long sought to turn into a park near East Alameda Avenue and Airport Boulevard.
In June 2012, Crandall finally raised $700,000, enough to build the memorial. “I spent 12 years talking to every church group, veterans organization, civic club and others who would have me, asking for support,” he remembers of those days.
“When we finally raised the money to build this, they (the city) had no idea how long it was going to be until the rest of that park was built. And I couldn’t see putting this in the middle of 140 acres of prairie dogs and weeds, and not knowing when it was going to be built,” he says.
That same summer, Tracy Young, manager of the city’s Parks, Recreation and Open Space department, was having lunch with Parks Director Tom Barrett at a Macaroni Grill near the Aurora Municipal Center. They were preparing for a public meeting to seek approval for the Springhill Park plan.
“I took a pen out of my purse. They have paper tablecloths,” she remembers. She started sketching out a potential place for the memorial. “We had the public meeting, and people accepted the idea, and the rest just happened.”
Since the memorial opened over a year and a half ago at Springhill Park, 200 more names have been discovered. Those names are listed on an orange stone marker at the end of the memorial.
“We’d have to raise $10,000 to add the names to a glass panel,” Crandall says. “Until that happens, we put them down on the stone, just to get them out here.”
Richard Gardner, a preservationist and state historian based in Golden, is to thank for many of the names.
Those who are familiar with the memorial may know about 23-year-old Army Sgt. Faith Hinkley. She was the first and only uniformed, female, active-duty from Colorado to die in combat, when insurgents attacked her unit in Iskandariya, Iraq, in 2010.
But they may not know about women who served during World War I because they’re not generally known to exist, according to Gardner. “You don’t look for people you don’t know are supposed to exist,” he says.
So far, Gardner has found six of them. “They were all medical, and how they died was in trying to save the soldiers’ lives from the great flu epidemic in 1918,” he explains. Their service with the Red Cross exposed them to the disease while helping the male soldiers.
The Freedom Memorial has inspired Gardner to dive deeper into Colorado’s lost stories and forgotten names.
Like the seven soldiers lost aboard the USS Cyclops, the largest non-hostile loss in U.S. Navy history, when the ship vanished in the Bermuda Triangle on March 4, 1918.
Or Private Roy Muncaster, who served aboard the USS Tuscania, the first American troop ship torpedoed and sunk in World War I. He worked to successfully launch lifeboats into the water despite no training for it, and boarded the last one. He died when it was dashed upon the rocky Scottish shore.
He remains buried at Kilhaughton Military Cemetery on the Isle of Islay, in Scotland.
“(His grave) was first cared for by the clan who owned the place, and his resting place is now maintained by The Commonwealth War Graves Commission, which is very unique since they usually do not maintain graves of casualties outside the British Commonwealth,” Gardner says.
A couple names below Baum is Army Private First Class Lars P. Chew. An Aurora soldier who died in 1991 when he was 20 years old, killed by a land mine while on a recon mission for operation Iraqi Desert Storm.
“I can’t believe somebody did all that work,” says his mother Berit Wallaker, when asked how she feels about his name being on the memorial more than 20 years after his death. Chew is buried at Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver.
“It’s very touching that people still remember him. It’s very important to me and my family. I only had two boys, and most of our family lives in Norway and England,” she says.
Gardner says what makes this memorial unique is it brings to light not only names from the past, but names we never even knew existed.
“One thing that’s well to keep in mind about the names on the Colorado Freedom Memorial is that, for many, this is actually the only thing around that indicates they ever existed, lived or died,” he says. “A number are memorialized elsewhere, but a number of others never even received a proper burial. Some were the pride and joy of Colorado towns that don’t even exist anymore. This memorial lets even the most anonymous of them be recognized with honor by the community and the world, even if all we still remember of them is a name.”