Musings while at the US Marine Corps War Memorial

Val and I were in Washington, D.C. for a week. Val attended a training course in the city and I was on vacation mode, fresh from boot camp. Some of the places I visited were about U.S. military history.

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A walk away from the Arlington National Cemetery is the U.S. Marine Corps War Memorial. It has got to be the most dramatic memorial that I have seen... yes, even more impactful than the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It featured a statue based on the most iconic photo taken during World War II (in my opinion): the flag-raising photo on Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.

I felt that this image was something I could relate to because it documented what happened in the Pacific Theatre of the war; a war that my grandparents survived from. The story immortalised by this sculpture is about the U.S. and Japan fighting over possession of Iwo Jima island. Despite the U.S. bombarding the island, the Japanese fought on in what proved to be one of the bloodiest battles in that side of the planet. The sight of the raised U.S. flag lifted the spirits of the Marines and helped boost their morale to eventually win the war.
As I walked around the memorial, I found myself having mixed emotions about the place. This prevented me from just walking away after taking souvenir photos. Instead, I sat down and thought about what this war memorial meant to me.
For one, I found it sad that visitors in the memorial were mostly there to take their social media photos and seemingly failed to see the gravity of the story. On the other hand, these people enjoy the freedom of behaving the way they were doing precisely because of the efforts done by the Marines (and the other members of the U.S. military). Aside from the other visitors' behaviours, I found myself cringing at this inscription on one side of the memorial: 
"Philippine Insurrection, 1898–1902"
The way this "insurrection" was described in the Philippine History classes I had attended was that the Philippines Republic was fighting against the United States which was attempting to take away the independence hard-fought by many Filipinos. However, seeing the U.S. perspective, that it's an insurrection, implies that the U.S. saw the Philippines as already part of its territory and the Filipinos were being rebellious. This view, in my opinion, is more accurate than the version I learned as a kid because of what I learned while visiting museums in the Philippines. These trips (which I took after years of learning one version of history) provided a more holistic view of what was happening globally: The Philippines was fighting for independence from the Spanish Empire in the late 1890s. On the other side of the Pacific, Spain was also waging war against its colonies and against the U.S. Suffice it to say that all these wars  significantly drained the coffers of the once powerful empire. The Treaty of Paris forced the Spanish Empire to cede Puerto Rico and Guam, and to sell the Philippines to the U.S. Naturally, Filipino revolutionaries thought that they won their independence; they didn't realise that money changed hands and their fight for freedom had to go on... only against a different coloniser.
On the other side of the memorial, however, I found that the Marines fought in Bataan and Corregidor during World War II and it made me feel cathartic. Bataan and Corregidor fell to the Imperial Japanese Army in the early 1940s. Major General Douglas MacArthur famously said, "I shall return." after the Philippines (a U.S. Commonwealth by that time) succumbed to the Japanese forces. He eventually fulfilled that promise and led the U.S. troops to liberate the Philippines from the Japanese. 
I left the memorial still deep in thought. Perhaps it's because I originated from a former U.S. colony and seeing memorials like this shows the close intertwining of the historical narratives of the Philippines and of the U.S. Or maybe because the little country on the other side of the Pacific Ocean, whose history I mostly learned in isolation, turns out to be a piece of the world history puzzle. 
I felt like I was on the edge of a paradigm shift.