"Steve Canyon," the adventurous pilot hero of the popular comic strip, was a U.S. Air Force officer in Korea and Vietnam. When the Korean cease fire was announced in 1953, Canyon mourned the loss of his comrades by reciting an inscription on the monument to University of Virginia Civil War dead.

Canyon's tribute was appropriate but his creator, Milt Caniff, had some of the details confused. The verse, taken from Laurence Binyon's "For the Fallen," was first published in the London Times of September 21, 1914, and was inscribed on a monument to the University of Virginia dead from World War I not the Civil War. The last line Canyon quotes actually reads "We will remember them" both in the poem and on the monument.