82 years later, San Francisco finally gets war memorial

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- The return of Fleet Week gives San Francisco a chance to honor our nation's heroes in a way some say is more than 80 years overdue. With the Blue Angels flying overhead, there was a dedication that took place for a memorial to those who paid the ultimate price.

"I just want to thank everyone wearing a white cap here for their service," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, said.

Feinstein addressed a crowd of men and women in uniform visiting San Francisco for Fleet Week. But she came to dedicate a memorial that's been on hold since even before she was mayor of San Francisco.

"Let me assure you that this day has been long in coming," former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said.

Mayors who followed Feinstein, including Brown, have been saddled with a job left unfinished for 82 years -- a monument to America's veterans, in the plaza between the Veterans' Building and the War Memorial Opera House. It was put off due to lack of money.

"There was a lot of talk over the years about completing it. Three separate committees were formed and disbanded," Feinstein said.

But in the meantime, veterans had created their own memorial.

"Over the years, and this just happened, people would come and they would bring soil from battlefields where Americans had lost their lives, and they would bury it within the octagon," veterans' memorial artist

Susan Narduli said.

And that's why Narduli designed the monument called Passage of Remembrance around the very soil left here by veterans. What was once buried in the ground is now sealed within the walls of the memorial.

"I felt the most important thing for me was a connection to that soil," Narduli said.

With all the fanfare fitting a monument to America's heroes, that soil was placed in a chest and slid inside the stone octagon -- a privately-funded $2.5 million tribute to those who gave their lives and those they left behind.

"By honoring the fallen, we must also honor those who really fought for and with, those who made it back home," U.S. Army Veteran Rogelio Manaois said.

For current Mayor Ed Lee, that's a call to action. He said, "Today, we are on our way to end chronic homelessness for veterans."

And for the artist, well, she designed the compartment to be re-opened over the years for soil from future wars.

"I hope we never have the opportunity to put any more soil in that octagon. That would be my dream," Narduli said.