POW-MIA
Temple Terrace, Hillsborough County, Florida
Marker Inscription
In memorium of the extraordinary sacrifice of the POW and MIA military personnel of Temple Terrace who served our nation's armed forces in wars declared and undeclared. -Jonathan Fielding BSA Eagle Project
The Story
This memorial honors the prisoners of war and those missing in action from Temple Terrace, Florida, who served in the nation's armed forces across conflicts both declared and undeclared. Created as a Boy Scout Eagle project, it reflects a community's effort to keep faith with service members whose fates remain unresolved. The POW/MIA cause became a lasting national commitment, its black-and-white flag a familiar emblem at memorials across the country.
Why it matters
POW/MIA memorials express an enduring American promise to account for and never forget those who did not return home, binding local communities to a national vow of remembrance.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Temple Terrace is a small city on the northeast edge of Tampa, Florida, a place that grew up around citrus groves and golf greens in the 1920s and settled into the kind of tight-knit suburban community where neighbors know one another's names. Like thousands of towns its size across America, it has sent its sons and daughters into uniform for generation after generation — through world wars and Cold War conflicts, through fights that Congress formally declared and "police actions" and deployments it never did.
The distinction the memorial draws — between wars "declared and undeclared" — is not casual wording. The United States has issued a formal declaration of war only a handful of times in its history, the last during the Second World War. Every American conflict since, from Korea to Vietnam to the long campaigns of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, was fought without one. The service and the sacrifice were no less real for the lack of a signature.
That is the backdrop against which a community chooses to build something permanent: an acknowledgment that some of its people went to war and did not come home whole, or did not come home at all.
People & events
The memorial exists because of one young person's initiative. It was created as a Boy Scout Eagle project — the capstone service undertaking that a Scout designs, plans, and leads to earn Scouting's highest rank. Reaching Eagle demands not just years of skill-building but proof that a young person can organize others toward a lasting good. Jonathan Fielding chose remembrance as that good.
An Eagle project is rarely the work of one pair of hands. It typically means rallying volunteers, raising materials, coordinating with a city or civic group, and seeing the whole thing through to a dedication. What stands in Temple Terrace, then, is both a tribute to service members and a quiet record of a teenager who decided that his community's prisoners of war and missing in action deserved a place to be honored.
The cause he took up has deep roots. The effort to account for America's POWs and those still missing became a sustained national movement in the decades after the Vietnam War, when families pressed the country never to close the book on the unreturned. Its black-and-white flag — a silhouetted figure, a watchtower, the words that promise no one is forgotten — became one of the most recognized emblems in the nation.
Its place in the American story
POW/MIA memorials speak to a promise that runs through American military tradition: that a nation which asks people to risk everything owes them, at the very least, an accounting. The prisoner of war endures captivity far from home; the service member listed as missing leaves behind a grief with no grave, no certainty, no final chapter. Both represent a debt the country has vowed not to leave unpaid.
That is why the POW/MIA flag flies over post offices, state capitols, and national cemeteries, and why federal law sets aside days for its display. It is the only flag besides the Stars and Stripes to fly over the White House on designated occasions. A local memorial like this one takes that vast national vow and roots it in a single town, making the abstract promise something a family can stand in front of.
There is also something distinctly American in how this particular memorial came to be — not commissioned by a government, but built by a young volunteer through a century-old youth movement. It shows how the work of remembrance passes down, generation to generation, carried forward by people who never knew the ones they honor.
If you visit
This is a place for a pause, not a long tour. Memorials like this reward a few quiet minutes rather than a checklist. Come expecting a modest, dignified marker rather than a grand monument — its power is in what it asks you to consider, not in its scale.
Look for the familiar POW/MIA imagery and read the dedication slowly. Notice the phrase about wars "declared and undeclared," and let it widen your sense of who is being remembered — not the veterans of one war, but of every conflict a small Florida community has been drawn into across the last century.
If you're building a day around the Tampa area, this makes a fitting first or last stop — a moment of reflection to bookend the outing. And if you visit around Memorial Day, the third Friday in September (National POW/MIA Recognition Day), or Veterans Day, you may find flags, flowers, or a small gathering that shows the memorial is still tended and still means something to the people who live nearby.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Jonathan Fielding
Themes & tags
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