Veteran on a ‘mission’ to build hub memorial Eyes Greenway as ‘dream location’

Veteran on a ‘mission’ to build hub memorial

Eyes Greenway as ‘dream location’

Photo by Brooks Canaday

Before he was 25, Dan Magoon did three tours in combat. He risked his life for strangers in Iraq and Afghanistan and saw his own life saved by the sacrifice of his brother soldiers.  One doesn’t come home after all that and act as if nothing happened. At least Dan Magoon didn’t.  "I made it back,” the Army veteran says with a wry smile. “I’m living the dream.”

Indeed, this 30-year-old South Boston native is now happily employed as a Boston firefighter. He tells you, “I have the family. I have the job. I have the house and the yard and all that.”  And yet, as Magoon stood on a manicured swath of the Rose Kennedy Greenway recently, sandwiched between the fire station on High Street and the crystal palace that is the Intercontinental Hotel, there was a deep restlessness in his eyes that burned as brightly as the red in his hair.

The dream Dan Magoon prefers to call “my mission” is to sanctify a treasured piece of the downtown landscape with a memorial to those of his generation who left home and laid down their lives so the rest of us could go on with ours.
What the young firefighter envisions for the Massachusetts Iraq and Afghanistan Fallen Heroes Memorial goes well beyond names on a wall.  “I want this memorial to tell you the story of each individual,” Magoon said, “I also would like to see it incorporate the sacrifice made by every family who saw a son or daughter go off to war and never return.”
He wants to go beyond the boundaries of conventional tribute, to somehow include those who made it back, only to be lost to the sinister effects of trauma and suicide.  “Right now we’ve raised about $300,000,” Magoon said. “We have a travelling, interactive memorial that’s been going around the state. But here, on this Greenway in the heart of Boston, this is our dream location. This is where a permanent memorial needs to be.”  The Greenway conservancy’s executive director was not available late last week to comment on that. But the mayor of Boston couldn’t agree more.

“Why not build a memorial there?” Tom Menino said. “I think it’s a great idea. The Greenway’s a wonderful spot for it. What better place to honor all those people from across this state who left their jobs, left their families and their homes so that we could enjoy the freedom we have?”  Sgt. Michael Jason Kelley was one of them. He left a loving family in Scituate seven years ago. He was 26 on June 8, 2005, when he was killed in a remote Afghan outpost, four miles from the Pakistan border.  “We love and miss our son daily,” said Joseph Kelley, trying to contain a swell of pride and pain that pulsated beneath his white shirt and his Old Glory tie. “Every holiday, every special occasion, we set aside a place for Michael. In that way we are reminded of the moments Michael will never see, the moments he gave up for us.”  “Dan’s vision for this memorial completes and compliments the circle our family has been working for these past seven years. And that is simply to keep Michael’s memory alive,” Kelley said. “But we also want to try and give back the love we have received to the other families of those who’ve fallen, along with those whose sons and daughters are now deployed.
Asked whether he thought the guardians of the Greenway might balk at having a veterans memorial grace their lawn, Joseph Kelley gazed up at the surrounding bank towers that line this urban oasis.

“My son, along with 165 other men and women from this state, laid down their lives, so that what happened in New York on 9/11 wasn’t repeated here,” Kelley said. “Let me ask you this: If they hadn’t made that sacrifice and a few more planes crashed into these buildings ... what kind of Greenway would we have then?”

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