At seven on the evening of New Year’s Day 2004, the air was still and the ground covered with six inches of crisp snow, following a storm in Portland. With candles, all gathered around the two large lists of the dead.

The ceremony began with this speech:

My name is Eric Bagai. I served in the United States Marine Corps from 1958, and was honorably discharged in 1965. I earned degrees in Psychology and Special Education from California State University at Los Angeles, and I’m a graduate of the National Leadership Training Program in Education at California State University at Northridge. I finished my career in public education as the Assistant Director of Special Education at Montebello Unified School District, and started a publishing company in Special Education materials, and still run it today.

Last year, ten million people marched in the streets, and tried to speak with one voice. Their message was simple. It was No! Don’t send our children to be killed, and to kill others. Many heads of state heard our voices. Our leaders did not. And so, because we love our country and teach our children to love her, our children were sent to war, and now these ones are dead. We are here to mourn for their loss. Those who survive and come back to us will spend the rest of their lives trying to repair their shattered sense of themselves as human beings. We mourn for them too.

We have tried to be responsible parents, to save our children from harm. But it seems that 55,000 voices in Portland, and ten million voices throughout the world, are not enough. Next time there must be twenty million. A hundred million. As many more voices as necessary.

These boards list those who died by violence, beginning on September 11, 2001, through this month. We know the names of the American and Coalition dead. But we know the names of only a few hundred of the Iraqi dead, and none at all of the Afghan dead. So only the dates, locations, and numbers of these un-named civilians who died by our bombs and our bullets are given here. They add up to over eleven thousand. If we had their names to list, it would take four more boards to show them. And it would take another eight boards to show the additional eighteen to twenty-thousand Afghan and Iraqi soldiers (most of them children, too) who were not counted at all.

So much death. We are stunned by these numbers no matter how they are presented: by the two boards that you see, and by the twelve more boards that would be here if we had the names of all of the dead. There must be a better way.

Now we will read the names of those who died in December. Please keep in mind that the occupation forces not only do not collect the names or numbers of civilian dead, but prohibit anyone from collecting them.

[Reading of the forty-eight names of the known war dead during December 2003.]

Thank you for coming. We will gather here again, on the first Thursday of next month. Please help us meet the costs of these gatherings. If each of you can put in a few dollars we can continue to gather each month, and perhaps spread The Mourning Project to other cities.

The ceremony concluded at 7:25 pm, and the park was empty by eight.