Thursday, June 06, 2002
Boardroom monkeyshines
Bob Slaughter belongs at the D-Day table

By STEVE STINSON

    Had I written that sentence 10 years ago, it would have required a fair amount of explanation. D Company refers to 29th Division veterans from Roanoke who landed at Normandy on D-Day. The anniversary commemorates that landing. It's today.

    Most people around here, especially school kids, know all that now and plenty more. If you asked any of them to name someone associated with D-Day, they would answer, "Bob Slaughter."

    Some of the D Company veterans who are here this weekend will make donations to the D-Day Memorial in Bedford. When they do, they will hand the check to Bob.

    Ask a man on the street why the Bedford memorial exists at all, he would answer, "Bob Slaughter."

    What none of these people would know, though, is that they refer to a man who no longer has any standing with the memorial.

    Bob has been stripped of his committee chairmanship at the memorial, and he has been removed from its mailing list. This done via the kind of boardroom monkeyshines that make your hair hurt.

    Why should you care? Because the memorial is very important, and it is not a finished product. Every day, decisions are made about the way the place will look and feel and work from now on, and Bob doesn't have a place at the table. No person on Earth more merits a seat there.

    Bob is my friend, and he's a war hero. His remarkable dedication to the project is well-documented. But my reasoning isn't sentimental. He deserves to be there on merit.

    It is important that he have a genuine role because the integrity of the unfinished memorial and the vision of Bob Slaughter are inseparable. To understand this, maybe it would be a good idea to look at the memorial again for the first time.

    It is unusual in a significant way: It is a memorial for the enlisted man. It isn't a showplace for a single work of art. It isn't a shrine to a concept. It tells a straightforward story simply and emotionally. It celebrates the uncountable, immeasurable deeds of people who would be otherwise unknown.

    What you see in Bedford today is, I guarantee you, the vision first expressed to me by Bob in 1987, now lived out.

    It is no one-man show, and he doesn't think that. Of course there were important contributions by others, hundreds of them. I could fill this page with names. But at its core, the arch on the hill represents the quiet yearning of thousands of veterans expressed through one tireless man.

    How do you think something this big got this far and still remained true to its purpose? This in the age of political correctness. Have you ever sat in a committee meeting? Have you ever witnessed a room full of otherwise competent individuals enact idiocy as a group? Imagine the ways this memorial could have been sullied or redirected.

    But it wasn't. There are two reasons for this:

    Bob was always in the room.

    Bob's vision went where Bob went.

    Now, Bob is no longer in the room. There are reasons for this, too.

    Bob Slaughter is a stubborn man. Stubbornness is underrated. It is only considered a vice by people who disagree with you. Here are two examples of people who may find Bob's stubbornness disagreeable:

    A German soldier whose position is under attack in 1944.

    A board member who finds other people's opinions inconvenient in 2002.

    There is a heroic side to stubbornness. You see it when a dream has been advanced for seven years and has moved scarcely an inch, and yet another committee meeting has drawn to a close and the afternoon heat drapes the room and there isn't enough in the kitty to buy stamps.

    People have long ago begun to mock the project, and even your friends look at you as though you were Sancho Panza. As members file out of the committee room, you watch Bob push away from the table, rise up, gather himself and then, well, tomorrow's another day.

    It is difficult to detail the scope of this. How small it was. Year after year, the National D-Day Memorial consisted of Bob Slaughter and a typewriter and a dozen or so people who managed in their way to nudge the cause along.

    As word of the project trickled out among veterans, something new happened. Bob began to receive packages in the mail - small packages packed with wartime mementos from the loved ones of dead veterans. Photos, medals, Bibles, souvenirs, letters home and small donations and notes to Bob. Could these objects help the memorial? Will you make sure they are preserved? Will my husband's memory live on?

    It is difficult to overstate this burden. What do you do with a shoebox packed with more love than it can hold? If you're Bob, you stack it in your bedroom and set your jaw and write another plea for money and silently vow to an entire generation that eventually you will win the day.

    So, he's stubborn, but Bob is also genuinely humble. He doesn't need to be chairman for life and final authority in Bedford. What drives him is more powerful: He's the guy who got the shoeboxes in the mail.

    The memorial's financial problems will be resolved over time. It's not as if it's going anywhere. Meanwhile, it's hard to find someone who doesn't like it. It's easy to look at it now and take for granted that it always belonged there.

    But there was a time when only one man knew that. And then two. And then three. And, well, you get the idea.

    My D-Day anniversary message to the board in Bedford is this: You'll never know where to go until you appreciate how you got there. You've been handed third base. Don't go thinking you hit a triple. We saw the play.

    STEVE STINSON, a commercial artist in Roanoke, was a member of the National D-Day Memorial founding committee and served on the board in its early years.