November 13 · This Day in America
It is not a statue. It is not heroic. It is a long black gash of polished granite cut into the earth of the Mall, and on it are 57,939 names, in the order the men and women died, not by rank. The design — by Maya Lin, a 21-year-old Yale student — was fought bitterly before this day. Then the veterans come. Thousands march to the site to dedicate it, and the country watches them touch the stone, find a name, press paper against it and rub a pencil to take it home. People who marched against the war stand beside people who fought it. A veteran calls it "the parade we never got." The polished wall gives back your own face among the names. America had not known how to mourn this war. The Wall taught it how.
Source: www.nps.gov
Also on this day · 1942
The light cruiser USS Juneau, already crippled the night before off Guadalcanal, takes a submarine torpedo into her magazines and is gone in 42 seconds. Aboard her are the five Sullivan brothers of Waterloo, Iowa, who had insisted on serving together. None survive. It is the heaviest single-family loss in American military history, and it leads the Navy to rethink how it ever lets kin sail into the same fire again.
Source: www.history.navy.mil