An Opera for the Tenth Anniversary of the Attacks on the World Trade Center

Please help me work through this news.  A column in yesterday's San Francisco Chronicle (MISS BIGELOW Social City "Military precision in opera event") announced that David Gockley's commissioned "Heart of a Soldier" will premiere September 10, for the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center.  It's an opera about Rick Rescorla,  "Vietnam vet and 9/11 hero," the one who, as Vice President of Security for Morgan-Stanley/Dean-Witter, the largest tenant in the World Trade Center, is said to have saved the lives of 2700 people by leading them down to safety while singing.  (Catherine Bigelow's column doesn't mention his singing, but that can be found at the following web address along with the words I'm quoting below)

  http://www.weweresoldiers.net/rick.htm

  "During combat in Vietnam, Lt. Rick Rescorla would sing to his troops to keep their spirits high while under fire.”

That should work well in the opera.  It goes on to say that Rescorla “used the same tactics to calm co-workers as he led them from their offices during the attacks on the World Trade Center."

 The premiere will be, appropriately, in the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, which was built in 1932 with the promise of a Veterans Memorial that was never built because of a shortage of funds.  (We always seem to have plenty of money to send soldiers to war but a shortage when it comes to our veterans.) 

Now, let me think.  It was in the Herbst Theatre, located at 401 Van Ness in the center of the War Memorial Veterans Building, that the U.N. Charter was signed "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war."  (That was on June 26, 1945, a couple of months before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) The Herbst Theatre was called the Veterans Auditorium when the United Nations Charter was signed, but it got a remodeling and name change in 1977.  They removed the reference to Veterans?  Why?

 Anyway,  now the Stephen Bechtel Fund has given a $1.5 million  grant to name the Site's Carriage Drive in honor of former U.S. Marine/Secretary of State George Schultz and his wife Charlotte Schultz, the Protocol Chief?  

(Why not name Carriage Drive in honor of Rick Rescora?  Or Pat Tillman?  Just a thought.)

Apparently this information about the naming was available back in May, but I missed it.  Carriage Drive encircles the Veterans Memorial site between the War Memorial Opera House and the Veterans Building. 

 So, on the topic of anniversaries, by Veterans Day 2012, the 80-year-old promise to build a Veterans Memorial will have been kept.

But something about this bothers me.  Maybe it’s the realization that George Shultz justified the Reagan administration’s policy in Central America by saying that our goals there were “like those we had in Vietnam:  democracy, economic progress and security against aggression….”  I can’t help thinking about Agent Orange, which made the headlines on September 11, 2001—headlines buried by the TV live news reports that day.