The new pile of marble was officially unveiled on Memorial Day and, in case you haven't seen it, it lies halfway between the Lincoln and Washington memorials on The Mall in Washington, D.C.—a round and odd-looking collection of chopped-off pillars, one for each state, with a pool and fountain in the middle.

The fountain sprays and is lighted at night, as are the pillars. In the daytime they don't seem as pretty. There also are two arches, Atlantic and Pacific, sort of indicating that the war was fought across both oceans.

Unlike the Vietnam Memorial, which bears the names of all of the dead of that conflict, there isn't room for the names of all the dead of World War II anywhere, so the dead are sort of lumped together in groups on the state pillars. This, I guess, shows the sacrifice of the country as a whole—universal—but it doesn't show much else.

In fact, perhaps because it is new, it looks like an interruption on The Mall, but not much else. In fact, it doesn't look like much of anything.

It cost a lot to build and it was rushed to completion, one of the chief reasons being that World War II veterans are dying off at a rate of several thousand a day and, if they didn't hurry, presumably they would have gone unremembered. (That's not quite true either, because there are assorted other memorials around the nation's capital to nurses, women veterans and the Marines of Iwo Jima.)

Maybe the memorial is round because World War II was a global conflict. It reached to almost every part of the world from South America to Thule, Greenland, and covered both the Atlantic and Pacific, so perhaps it is not possible to design a memorial that includes the whole war in remembrance.

Even so, the design is oddly unmemorable or unmemorial, if I can coin a word. Somehow it seems like a resurrected coliseum, neither here nor there, sort of and not very representative (at least to me) of the Big War—or anything else.

But then, the Vietnam Memorial excepted, the marble orchard that Washington, D.C., has become doesn't really have many memorable memorials. There's Lincoln's, surely in a class by itself—but so was he—and so some say is FDR's, though whether it will endure as well as the Lincoln Memorial only time will tell. The Washington Monument is, well, the Washington Monument. It's there because it's there, but whether it really memorializes the spirit of Washington or not, I leave to you.

Oddly enough, the Vietnam Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, marks a defeat, not the victory we enjoyed with World War II, but it is memorable. It stays in the mind long after a visit. Its shapes and the thousands of names that cover it are what make it what it is, I think. Certainly everyone who goes to it comes away moved. Whether they'll do that with the new World War II Memorial is, to my mind, uncertain.

But then I remain uncertain as to whether there ought to be a memorial to any war. Actually, memorials aren't to the wars or to the victors, but to their dead and to the mystery of why we have wars in the first place. We continue to suffer from this odd dichotomy: we hate wars, but revere those who fought them. It's an enigma we haven't yet solved, perhaps one we'll never solve.

But we keep on building them. Probably in time there will be a memorial to the first and second Gulf Wars.

As a veteran of World War II, since the new memorial has been unveiled, I've turned over in my mind the memorials that have impressed me. One is the Iwo Jima Memorial, which actually is a bronze re-creation of a news photograph taken on Mt. Suribachi on the island.

Over time it's become more than a photograph, it's been the subject of books and legends, a moment frozen in time and now in bronze. It's taken on a life of its own. It has all the elements a war memorial should have, particularly a victorious one.

Maybe we should have quit with that one.

Another that most sticks in my mind and is much less known is the memorial at the Airborne Cemetery in Margraten, the Netherlands, where my best friend of high school days lies buried. Most of the dead in the cemetery are paratroopers, glider troopers, glider pilots or the like.

In designing the cemetery, the architect placed a plain bare square tower and a wall with the airborne battles inscribed on a permanent map, a small square reflecting pool and the figure of a hooded woman. Just over her shoulder flies a flight of birds.

The effect is stark and tragic and at the same time memorable. Round the center of the cemetery are rows and rows of crosses and Stars of David—all that remains of the men, most who flew to their deaths as airborne soldiers. It's a scene that stays in the memory and one that I've always thought would have pleased my friend, who was just 20 when he died.

Yet I also have to think his memorial lives neither in Dutch ground nor in the birds flying at the woman's shoulder, but most importantly in my memory.