VCU Participates in a National Honor Roll Reading to Honor Fallen Military Personnel

Virginia Commonwealth University has joined a national grassroots effort to honor American service men and women killed in the line of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Campus and community volunteers at VCU and more than 150 colleges and universities in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., will read the names of more than 6,200 casualties of Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OEF), now called Operation New Dawn.

The honor roll reading takes place on Veterans Day, Friday, Nov. 11, beginning at 9 a.m. at the University Student Commons Plaza. The reading of the names will take nearly eight hours to complete as readers announce the names in chronological order of the time of their deaths. 

“We’ve asked faculty and staff who are veterans, student veterans and members of organizations such as Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion posts to join with us in reading the names,” said Martha Lou Green, special assistant to the provost
for student veteran support.

The Remembrance Day National Roll Call is sponsored nationally by the Veterans Knowledge Community of NASPA Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education. NASPA is a 12,000-member association for the advancement, health and sustainability of the student affairs professionals.

The Veterans Knowledge Community (VKC) mission is to advocate for best practices to help student veterans transition to college and succeed. As the National Roll Call sponsor, the goal of VKC is to have at least one institution in each of the 50 states participate in the event.

“We wanted to rally campus communities across the nation to send a powerful message to the troops currently serving that their peers have not forgotten their sacrifices, or those of the fallen,” said Lt. Col. (Ret) Brett Morris, the National Roll Call coordinator who is also a retired Army officer and the associate director for veterans affairs at Eastern Kentucky University. “The reading of individual names is very poignant because it emphasizes the significance of each and every life lost.”

Names provided to the National Roll Call were recorded by iCasualties.org.

For information about the Virginia Commonwealth University Roll Call event contact Martha Lou Green at 804-828-5993 or mlgreen@vcu.edu.