U.S. Grant deserves his Mall monument

Thanks for Jonathan Yardley's comment on the Grant Memorial ["Forgotten warrior," Outlook, Nov. 22], possibly the most sublime monument in Washington.

Collar to the wind, hat drawn down to the rain, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's face is hardly visible. The men right and left are doing the heavy work; Grant thinks it out, the terrible onus on him. This is a monument mainly to a man's and a nation's determination.

At Florida, Mo., Grant learned that the hardest thing he had to overcome was his own fear; doing that, he found that the rest was not so bad. At Shiloh, Grant understood that he could win if only he did not admit defeat and would press on inexorably with his marginally superior force. This is the lesson he applied to the Vicksburg Campaign, Chattanooga and the Overland Campaign.

No one has been more American than Grant: bright, disadvantaged, brave, moral, compassionate, determined to achieve the result wished for by his country and not resting until he had. The monument deserves its pride of place.

Brooke C. Stoddard, Alexandria