The cemetery's location carries an almost unbearable weight of history. It lies over part of the ruins of Roman Carthage, itself built on the ashes of the Punic city that Rome destroyed in 146 BC. American soldiers who fought and died in the North African campaigns of World War II now rest in earth that has absorbed conflict for over two thousand years. Dedicated in 1960 and administered by the American Battle Monuments Commission, the cemetery sits about 10 miles from the city of Tunis, on a hillside where Mediterranean light falls across white marble headstones arranged in nine rectangular plots separated by wide paths.

Beyond the rows of graves, a long wall runs along the southeast edge of the burial area. This is the Wall of the Missing, and it bears 3,724 names, each one a servicemember whose remains were never recovered or identified. Rosettes have been carved beside the names of those who were later found and brought home. The wall stands at the edge of a tree-lined terrace that leads to the memorial, a quiet progression from absence to remembrance. Together, the headstones and the wall account for more than 6,500 Americans whose last chapter was written somewhere in the vast theater of operations stretching from Morocco to Tunisia.

Among the dead are people whose stories defy the anonymity of mass warfare. Private Nicholas Minue, a Greek immigrant from New Jersey, earned the Medal of Honor for single-handedly attacking an enemy position near Medjez el Bab, Tunisia, in 1943. He was killed in the action that earned him the nation's highest military honor. First Lieutenant Robert M. Emery received a posthumous Distinguished Service Cross for his actions near Djebel Mrdajajdo in Algeria. And then there is Draper, the Olympic sprinter turned combat pilot, whose trajectory from a Berlin medal stand to a North African grave encapsulates the terrible velocity of the 20th century.

The memorial chapel and court were designed to harmonize with the local North African architecture, their forms echoing the region's building traditions rather than imposing a purely American aesthetic. Inside the chapel, polished marble walls frame flags and sculpture. The memorial court features large mosaic and ceramic maps depicting the operations and supply routes of American forces across Africa and extending to the Persian Gulf. At its center, decorative pools catch the light at the intersections of the wide paths that divide the burial plots. The effect is one of stillness and order imposed upon the chaos of war, a place where the scale of sacrifice can be comprehended one name at a time.