Sacrifice

I’m home for a spell, getting reacquainted with family, house, office and yard. It’s been a long several weeks of travel, and I’m already enjoying the bay-window view from our home office more than I typically would, watching the robins chase baby grasshoppers through the grass.

I flew home yesterday morning from Dallas, and on the plane managed to read both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. Somewhere in the middle of these two publications of record is the Middle Position, and I enjoy reading them back-to-back.

In Friday’s journal was a piece by Daniel Henninger, author of the regular OpEd column Wonderland. As we begin this weekend of remembrance, it’s something I wanted to share. Enjoy; hope it makes you think.

The Ultimate Sacrifice Asks for One Day

CALVERTON, N.Y.—Here at Calverton National Cemetery, a place of sandy soil and quiet trees on eastern Long Island, workers are putting up American flags that will line the roads on this Memorial Day weekend. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts will arrive tomorrow to place small flags on each of Calverton’s 146,000 grave sites. This is Calverton’s busiest weekend.

But on a rainy afternoon in midweek, Calverton was empty and calm. It was probably like this in all of the 120 national cemeteries around the United States, which hold the remains of American soldiers all the way back to the Civil War.

I saw an old man at Calverton park his pickup and head out with a bad limp across an expanse of white grave markers. He seemed to know where he was going. I stopped by two new graves, side by side, with very white headstones. They had fresh flowers and a votive candle still burning from morning visitors. Someone had left an unopened bottle of Bud beneath the flowers, meaning I guess that the soldier liked his beer.

Both of these men, Army Staff Sgt. Anthony S. Lagman and Sgt. Michael J. Esposito Jr., winners of the Bronze Star with valor, were killed the same day in Afghanistan in March. Sgt. Lagman’s headstone says: “Persian Gulf, Bosnia, Afghanistan.” To the right of their graves lies Marine Lance Cpl. William Wayne White, who died last year, early in the Iraq war.

Most people don’t seem to know there are more than 100 national cemeteries around the United States. Nearly every one will have public services this Memorial Day weekend. Most of the employees of the National Cemetery Administration, a relatively small agency, are themselves former veterans, who ensure that each of these beautifully landscaped and austere facilities is as impressive as the familiar photographs of Arlington Cemetery.

Memorial Day itself has been a holiday in decline from its original purpose, the honoring of the nation’s war dead, an idea born in the internal sorrows of the Civil War. Memorial Day parades, though still held, are often not the bracing civic reminders they once were of the idea of national service. More recently, this day at the end of May has become a Monday off and a chance to prepare for summer.

The U.S. military itself contributed to the decline, concluding from the Vietnam experience that the draft was more trouble than it was worth. The military wanted men and women committed to service, not gripers coerced into it. It was popularly said that in place of a citizens’ army we had created a professional army. That distinction is breaking down under the reality of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the deaths in service that have attended them. An old phrase, “the ultimate sacrifice,” is being heard again, and with it the idea of great honor for war’s fallen fighters.

If you go to a national cemetery this Monday (the list is at www.cem.va.gov/index.htm), you will find people gathered for whom Memorial Day is as real now as it was in the 19th century. Last year at Calverton, some 2,000 people came for the ceremonies. The little, 0.3-acre cemetery at Danville, Ky., established in 1862, had 50 people. But 10,000 will likely come for the service in Riverside, Calif., 5,000 at Fort Custer cemetery in Michigan, 8,000 in Houston, 3,000 in Oregon, 1,500 at Fort Richardson, Alaska, and 2,300 in Puerto Rico.

There will be speeches, color guards, flyovers where possible and of course a bugler to play taps. Volunteer groups organize most of these ceremonies. Indeed at many of the cemeteries volunteers often provide the three-person color guard to which every veteran is now entitled at burial.

There are 16,897,000 living veterans, which makes for a very large band of brothers. At a big cemetery like Calverton on Long Island, they’ll do 7,300 burials a year. Standing in this cemetery on a wet day, staring out at field after field of white gravestones in perfect rows, each marked with a name and a war, one frankly has the expectable, and welcome, feelings of gratitude and respect. Still, one can’t help but feel overtaken by the awful, indiscreet largeness of war’s claims on the living. Amid Calverton’s stillness, the cemetery’s director Rick Boyd offers without prompting: “Each one of these people had a particular service story, and I often wish I could know what they were.”

If you go to the Cypress Hills national cemetery in Brooklyn, you can see the grave of Sgt. John Martin, trumpeter, Seventh Cavalry, killed at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. He was born in Italy as Giovanni Martini. Yesterday coming to work past the September 11 World Trade site, I encountered about 200 very young Marines outside the fence, dressed in simple training fatigues—green T-shirts, pants and boots—standing in formation, at attention, stock still at an awards ceremony. We don’t see this sort of thing in Manhattan very often, and when they marched off—their stern, impossibly youthful faces reflecting the modern American melting pot whence came Giovanni Martini, bugler—the commuting office workers began to applaud.

Much of the politicking around Iraq is rather nasty just now. And there will be more of it. For a minute this Memorial Day weekend, ponder the simple individual nobility held forever in those 120 national cemeteries.