I wouldn't be perturbed if I understood why this was any better than flags at a cemetery, or on a street corner, or whatever. But this proposal just doesn't feel right.
I do come across memorials from time to time while hiking. I've paid respects at the monuments of Frank Layman, a literally fallen firefighter; of William Curtis and Allan Ormsbee ,who blazed the southwest approach to Slide Mountain in the Catskills, subsequently perished in a blizzard in the Whites in June of 1900, and whose ashes were strewn near the head of the trail that bears their name; of John Burroughs, who is second only to Muir in writing that reintroduced the world of Manifest Destiny to the harmonies of nature; and of Raymond Torrey, who, while he was not the visionary that Benton MacKaye or Myron Avery were, nevertheless blazed the first miles of Appalachian trail through Bear Mountain and Harriman, and whose ashes were given to the wind at his favorite overlook in Harriman, a short distance from the New York Long Path. I hope someday to visit others: Ernie Pyle, Noah John Rondeau, Daniel Shays, the list of people memorialized in the wilderness is long.
I've visited plane wrecks and abandoned family cemeteries in the woods, and prayed for the repose of those who lie there, some of their names now forgotten. And I know that some of the names graven in the rock at some of the Catskill overlooks - they have an abundance of very old graffiti - belong to people whose remains were given to the winds off the same rocks. Where I hike, therefore, memorials abound, simply because the places had a rich history before the woods were allowed to reclaim them.
Someday, I shall climb the trailless mountain where my step-grandfather disappeared, 73 years ago, and pay my respects to him in a place that, while it is "forever wild" under the law, is still forever his in a deeper and more abiding sense. If I do so, I shall most likely build a small cairn of stones, some short distance out of sight of the summit, and bury his name (possibly engraved on a bit of rock or aluminium, so as to withstand the elements for a time) within it. Someday, too, I shall visit the plane crash in the Vermont backcountry where fell the man who was my first real friend when I went to college far from anyone I knew; the hiker who first led me above the timberline afoot; the youth whose short earthly life ended on a foggy night mere months after we met, now forty years ago.
While none of these memorials has Left No Trace, they do not bother me in the slightest. They are placed on land that forever belongs to the departed. Those remembered left their trace indelibly in their having held the land and worked it before Nature reclaimed it, in their pioneering new routes and blazing trail, in their stewardship of the land, and in their very bones and ashes. In life they enriched the land, rather than defacing it. In death their markers silently cry out: Hiker, as you pass, remember me and do likewise!
For someone who does not have the same deep connection to a particular spot of wilderness, leaving a memorial in an arbitrary spot just doesn't feel quite right. The memory of our fallen warriors is sacred, and deserves to be upheld. Nevertheless, the laudable impulse to remember them seems misdirected if it leaves traces that are not theirs in land that we all are supposed to respect and leave undefiled. To me, it feels as if it would end by honouring neither their memory nor the land.