Posted by Media Release

Walnut Hills High School students will remember all of the lives lost in Iraq with a seven-hour vigil on Monday, March 3. Students will represent each life lost with a grain of rice. The ceremony will take place in the Arcade area in the school building.

Beginning at 7:30 a.m. and continuing until 2:30 p.m., students will read from a list the names of persons from the U.S. military who lost their lives in Iraq and symbolically drop one grain of rice for each person into an urn. Altogether nearly 4,000 U.S. military personnel have lost their lives in the Iraq War.

At the same time, other students will symbolically place into an urn more than 600,000 grains of rice, representing the estimated number of Iraqis who have lost their lives during the course of the war. There will be a short press conference at 2:40 during which student organizers of the event will be available to speak with the media.

“We are devastated by the extreme loss of life that this war has caused and we feel that we need to call attention to that,” said Margaret Kran-Annexstein, a

junior at Walnut, “We are hoping to raise awareness in our school and show the community that this war is not acceptable.”

A few years ago Walnut Hills students created a mock cemetery in a green area on the campus to remember the then 2,000 U.S. military servicemen and servicewomen who had been killed in the war.

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