SDSU War Memorial Veteran Profiles & Demographics
This page is dedicated to digitizing the Veteran Demographics and Profiles of the SDSU Vets that are honored by this War Memorial.
Below are the SDSU War Memorial's most distinguished servicemembers:
The Navy Cross, bestowed on U.S. sailors and marines.
The Distinguished Service Cross for U.S. Army soldiers.
The Air Force Cross for U.S. Air Force soldiers.
The Crosses are second only to the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest recognition. The crosses are awarded to exceptional members of the United States military who exhibited “extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force and going beyond the call of duty.”
Navy Cross, Distinguished Service (Army), and Airforce Cross Recepients
Below you will find a PDF of a tribute that was writen by Dr. Robert Fikes, Jr., Emeritus Librarian at San Diego State University.
In it, Dr. Fikes compiled all the known information about the memorial, and the war memorial veterans profiles as of 2005. San Diego State University’s military alumni started out as one of three sabbatical projects in the fall of 2005 and was intended to be a survey of the school’s contributions to the nation’s armed forces.
These statistics, taken from Dr. Fikes' Supreme Sacrifice, Extraordinary Service: Profiles of SDSU Military Alumni, provide context for how SDSU was engaged in each major conflict since World War II. The number of students that have died in service of the United States military is highest from World War II. This can be attributed to the totality of the war and the massive quantity of personel involved across the country. It was the sacrifice of these students that inspired the initial fund that would culminate the in the SDSU War Memorial of today. The first graph, while displaying the overal number of deaths from each conflict , is further broken into "accidents" and "KIA." This distinction is made because the number of deaths caused before or after the United States officially entered the conflict, or during training accidents compared to deaths caused by direct combat.
This graph displays the average age of servicemembers at the time of their death. With each passing era, the average age increased by a couple of years. The average age in total remained between 24-29.
This graph allows for the comparison in the scale of the number of servicemembers killed in each war. This graph can also be seen as a measure of the level of United States involvement in each war. Obviously, World War II and the Vietnam War hold the largest portion of casualties for SDSU servicemembers, aligned with the casualty rates for servicemembers of these wars across the nation. [7]
Work Cited:
[7] Fikes, Jr., Robert. Supreme Sacrifice, Extraordinary Service: Profiles of SDSU Military Alumni. Published by SDSU Alumni Association. January 2021, 216. Online access: https://www.sdsualumni.org/s/997/22/page.aspx?gid=1&pgid=472&no_cookie=1.