A group of military veterans came out early on a cold Saturday morning to put red flags into the lawn near Chapman Hall, one for every service member killed in Iraq since 2003.
The red flags filled the triangular stretch of grass allotted to them and had to spill over to the next patch, where white flags commemorating Iraqi lives lost were being set up.
“That’s when it got sensitive for most people,” student Shane Addis said, looking over more than 3,800 flags representing fallen brothers and sisters-in-arms.

“Last year it could have fit there, but this year it’s a little different,” Addis, a 24-year-old Marine Corp Reserveman who was deployed to Iraq in 2005, said. According to a press release for the exhibit, an extra batch of 1,000 red flags had to be purchased this year to represent nearly 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed since February.
The Iraq Body Count Exhibit returned to campus this week as part Veterans Awareness Week and Week of Remembrance.
The collection of more than 150,000 flags covers the lawn from 13th Avenue to Knight Library, and from PLC nearly to University Street.
One white flag represents six Iraqi deaths; one red flag represents one fallen U.S. service member. The number of Iraqi deaths comes from a 2006 Lancet Report estimate of 655,000 since the start of the war, with additions for Iraqis killed since that time which raises the number to between 900,000 and one million, according to the exhibit’s press release.
The exhibit is now part of a larger collaboration between the Survival Center, which focuses on environmental and peace activism, and the Veterans and Family Student Association. The veterans group and peace activists are collaborating this week for a series of events commemorating the cost of war.
The flag exhibit started at the University of Colorado in October 2006. It first came to the University in February, and has since traveled to University of California, Berkeley; Portland State University; Reed College; Oregon State University and Lewis and Clark College, according to Survival Center co-director Zack Basaraba and the exhibit’s Web site.
Basaraba said he hopes to bring the exhibit back every year until the conflict ends. Volunteers started setting up the flags at 10 a.m. Saturday and were still working Sunday afternoon.
“To us it’s a face; it’s a family that we’ve known. So why shouldn’t a veteran do it?” he said.
About 10 veterans came out to help put up the red flags, some from other generations and conflicts who had heard about the event from flyers around the community or from just passing by.
Addis, who is also co-director of the VFSA, estimated there are 300 student veterans on campus, though only about 150 students receive benefits through the Office of Veterans Affairs. The veterans group currently has 60 members on its e-mail list which includes family members and spouses of soldiers.
The group will organize events in collaboration with the Survival Center all week. On Monday, the Survival Center will host The Cost of War, a panel discussion with professors and community members in the EMU Amphitheater. On Tuesday, both the Survival Center and the VFSA will host open houses in the basement of the EMU. Wednesday will see a veterans memorial service in the EMU Amphitheater which will showcase multicultural aspects of student veterans, and on Thursday there will be a veterans panel discussion in PLC 180.
“The point is to bring all our communities together because only through solidarity can we find international and social justice,” Basaraba said.
Sean Jin, VFSA activities director, said the events will not have a political agenda. Instead, they will promote “understanding of the experiences and of the stories of the people that have been involved in the conflict.”
“My take on the Survival Center’s project is not to be speaking out against the Iraq war so much as it is exploring the cost of war and the unanimous and inevitable pain that war causes regardless of which side you are on,” Jin, a 20-year-old officer candidate in the Navy, said.
“You cannot avoid the fact that war causes death and pain and suffering,” he said.
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