Former U.S. Army Capt. William Swenson has waited seven years for Congress to approve a memorial for his fellow National Medal of Honor recipients in the nation’s capital.
Now, lawmakers are poised to make that monument a reality, with the expected passage this year of the “Hershel ‘Woody’ Williams National Medal of Honor Monument Location Act.” The legislation, S. 858, could get its final approval from Congress not long after Memorial Day, ending a yearslong debate over whether the monument to soldiers who displayed courage and valor on the battlefield should be built in the heart of the nation’s capital.
“With Memorial Day around the corner, our nation is one step closer to honoring our bravest heroes with a permanent tribute on the National Mall,” said Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Calif.) a former U.S. Marine reservist and one of the House version’s co-sponsors. “This bill carries the spirit of Hershel ‘Woody’ Williams and every Medal of Honor recipient whose courage kept our country free.”
The idea to build a monument to National Medal of Honor recipients has enjoyed bipartisan support since it was first approved by Congress in 2021. But the location has proved a sticking point. Subsequent legislation to place the monument near the Lincoln Memorial — given that president’s role in creating the award — was delayed by congressional procedure and resistance to adding another monument to a protected corridor of the National Mall.
Those decades-old protections have come under scrutiny recently amid President Donald Trump’s own efforts to leave his architectural stamp on the National Mall, the central public space in Washington designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant in 1791 that’s home to the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and various commemorative works to honor significant figures in U.S. history, political leaders and U.S. soldiers from several wars. Trump has been breezing through the traditionally laborious process for his projects.
For Swenson — who was awarded the National Medal of Honor in 2013 by President Barack Obama to honor his effort to retrieve fallen soldiers and save several others during a six-hour ambush in Afghanistan — the congressional approval couldn’t come soon enough.
Of the nearly 4,000 recipients of the medal since it was created by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, just 64 are alive today. Swenson said he fears further delay in the location’s approval could mean some of those soldiers never see its completion.
“We do not have all the time in the world to make this happen,” Swenson said.
The bill’s namesake, a West Virginia soldier and the last living recipient of the award from World War II, Hershel “Woody” Williams, died in 2022 while awaiting the monument’s location approval. Within a decade, Swenson anticipates the number of living Medal of Honor awardees will fall by half, as members of the generation that participated in the Vietnam War reach the end of their lives. Presidents awarded more than 250 men who fought in Vietnam with the medal, the largest number since World War II. Only one woman has been awarded the medal, a Civil War surgeon named Mary Edwards Walker.
If approved, the new monument will be located somewhere within the Reserve, a central axis of public green space in the National Mall that stretches from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial in one direction and from the White House to the Jefferson Memorial in another.
Part of the original design by L’Enfant, which includes specific locations for monuments or memorials to be added over time, the Reserve was carved out by Congress in a 2003 amendment to the Commemorative Works Act, declaring that portion of the mall a “completed work of civic art” and barring any new memorials or monuments.
It’s under a similar provision of that law that a group of veterans is currently suing the Trump administration for seeking to build a 250-foot-tall triumphal arch in a separate protected area of the National Mall. They argue Congress must sign off on building the arch in the location targeted by the president and that the large structure would tower over the nearby Arlington National Cemetery and impede the view of the Lincoln Memorial.
The orginal legislation argued that the National Medal of Honor monument would be best placed near the Lincoln Memorial as “a respectful extension of Lincoln’s enduring legacy and recognition of what ordinary people can accomplish when working for the greater good.”
Utah Rep. Blake Moore, a Republican sponsor of the House legislation to locate the monument in the Reserve, said it would “provide Medal of Honor recipients and their families a deserved commemoration on the National Mall, where visitors from across the world can come and reflect on the great sacrifices of our American heroes.”
But in 2024, then-National Park Service Associate Director Michael Caldwell testified before Congress that while the agency supported the monument, it disagreed that it should be placed in the Reserve, out of respect for the congressional protections.
NPS declined to comment until the bill has passed. But the agency will play a role in where the monument specifically lands on the mall. The National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation, which would build the monument, gets a preference of a short list of available locations. But NPS will be closely involved in the final decision, said Cory Crowley, the museum foundation’s executive vice president.
Swenson said he understood the reservations about cluttering the Washington mall with new memorials. But he argued that this monument qualifies for an exemption.
“I understand preserving the mall and keeping it from just getting overrun with sort of superfluous pop-culture stuff. It’s going to be something that is an indelible mark on our National Mall,” he said. “But this really seems fairly straightforward. This is something that needs to be done.”
The memorial is not the first to navigate a morass of rules to get approval. In roughly the last decade, Congress has approved several new monuments for construction on the National Mall, including a World War I Memorial, another for Desert Shield and Desert Storm and a memorial for journalists killed in the line of their work.
But Crowley noted that the challenging process for building in Washington is the reason the foundation chose to locate its museum about National Medal of Honor recipients in Arlington, Texas — it opened just last year.
The Washington area was also shortlisted for the location, but the foundation decided to locate the museum in a part of the country where it could move forward more swiftly and spend their political capital getting a monument or memorial approved in the capital, he said.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the Republican who sponsored the 2021 legislation for the monument, said the memorial will remind visitors to the nation’s capital “of what it means to put your country first.”
“The selfless service members who have earned the Medal of Honor — like the fabled Patrick Brady and Audie Murphy, to name a few — deserve our utmost respect and recognition, and I applaud the Foundation, which calls Arlington, Texas home, for their hard work and advocacy,” he said in a statement.
If approved this month, the monument’s progress would fall at a time when Trump is unilaterally seeking to push through projects within protected areas of the nation’s capital. Along with the arch, Trump is seeking to build a ballroom to replace the East Wing of the White House and a statute garden to honor “heroes” of U.S. history.
The arch would be located in separate protected green space called Area I.
Crowley, a former aide to Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, said the president’s bullish way of forcing through projects in Washington has been frustrating to watch for an organization that tried to go through the traditional process. But he added that the process has likely become “more complicated than it needs to be.”
“There is some unnecessary red tape,” he said. “To the extent [Trump’s] exposing some of that and making it easier for people with legitimate causes and recognitions to gain access to telling their story on the mall — I think that part’s a good thing.”
