Weekend Down South: Lockerbie Memorial

I've spoken A few months ago, I wrote about meeting Terry Waite in Aberdeen. While we were out and about, Cap'n John and I stopped into the village of Lockerbie for a bit of a pilgrimage. Lockerbie was the site of the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 disaster, when a Boeing 747 was bombed and came apart over the Scottish village of Lockerbie while leaving London for New York. The attack was quickly attributed to Libyan terrorists, and the Libyan government acknowledged responsibility and paid restitution the victims' families in 2003 (although some deny the link to this day). Libyan intelligence officer Abdelbaset al Megrahi was convicted of the crime and served several years of a life sentence, before his controversial 2009 release by the Scottish government on "compassionate grounds".

Lockerbie maintains a beautiful tribute to the victims at Dryfesdale Cemetery, which is located just west of the main village. The Cap'n and I went, had a few minutes in the visitor's center followed by a few minutes in the memorial garden. For a guy like me who's spent a great deal of his life working to protect people from attacks like Lockerbie, this garden was an important reminder of both the cost of failure, and the importance of success. I was humbled, and pleased that Cap'n John and I were able to visit this tribute to some of the casualties of the Long War.