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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday April 28, 2003 Volume V Number 18 |
FOCUS - Unknowns
As you approach Arlington National Cemetery, you are welcomed by a sign reminding you that America’s heroes have been laid to rest in this place, and that a solemn reverence is appreciated. You would expect this to be assumed, but it isn’t. This is not a playground or a public park. The gardens and the trees, this time of year, in bloom, may look like a place for hiking and a Fourth of July picnic, and an informal baseball game, or walking your pedigree, or tossing the Frisbee, or bicycling through the dogwoods. But it is none of these things.
This is a sacred place of remembrance and reflection.
Standing on the South West corner of the Lincoln Memorial, you look across the Potomac, a straight diagonal line across the bridge. Arlington Boulevard crosses the river there, and points you directly to the National Cemetery and a broad expanse of green. Up the hill, you notice a gray stone memorial to the women who have served in the armed forces, and just above perched on the ridge, a Jeffersonian style house, with a neo-classical Roman portico, bold columns and a wide triangular façade, overlooking the most powerful city on the planet, a conspicuous house that once belonged to Robert E. Lee.
We Americans have shared some collective moments of grief at this place. I remember well that awful weekend when our President, who just days before fell at the hands of an assassin when a precise rifle shot rang out from a book depository in Dallas. Seated next to his wife and just behind the Texas governor in an open car, his life ended with horrifying abruptness. He became a legend that day, and when the horse drawn carriage halted after a somber parade through the streets of the Capital, past the Lincoln Memorial and across the Potomac and up the hill, his body was laid to rest just below the Lee Mansion, with a view back to the city, the wide Potomac River, the Mall, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials and the Washington Monument, and off in the distance, the unmistakable silhouette of the Capitol Dome. I was a sophomore in high school and had never visited Washington DC. Arlington Cemetery was black and white to me then, and wintry cold that November. Even the crisp and clear blue sky was a shade of gray. Along with the rest of the nation, I watched on a small flickering television screen as Walter Cronkite narrated the event.
When I saw the gravesite for the first time in 1974, the blue sky and the green lawns and the shade trees and the gardens were stunning. Beside the elegant and simple marker with the near mythic name JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY and the numbered years 1917-1963, just behind, an eternal flame lit by his wife and his brothers in that solemn ceremony burned bright. That flame still quietly flickers there today.
This weekend, we visited that grave site once more. Time passes, and now there are four markers. The two children lost to the young couple are buried beside their father (one stillborn and unnamed), and then the wife of the President, who temporarily gave up her privilege to be buried at Arlington when she married a Greek citizen, became eligible again when widowed for the second time, she, too, is laid to rest by her first husband and her children beside the Eternal Flame in the place she chose on a grassy knoll overlooking the great city so many years before.
Even now, on a weekday in the Springtime, we were among hundreds of visitors, waiting behind a chain in a line of tourists eager to catch a glimpse, in solemn silence. Some of the President’s choicest remarks are etched in granite and marble around the site. In the presence of the stones and the markers and the flame, I stood there for a moment, and remembered.
And somehow, felt connected in the remembering.
* * * * * * *
Along the way, we were told about the notable Americans buried here. Presidents and war heroes and historic figures.
Robert E. Lee, a graduate of the United States Military at West Point (1829, second in his class) married into money. By 1857, he distinguished himself as a superb military strategist and renown commander, and won the heart of one Mary Anna Randolph Custis, daughter of George Washington Park Custis, who owned over a thousand acres of prime Virginia land and an historic house chock full of treasures from all over the world on a hilltop that overlooked the Potomac River and the Federal Capital of the United States. She inherited this magnificent property, including slave’s quarters, when her father died just a few years earlier. Lee moved in with his new wife, just as tensions were mounting over the slavery issue, and a lanky Illinois attorney was gaining momentum as a Presidential candidate in his well publicized debates with Steven A. Douglas.
The new Commander in Chief, knowing that war was inevitable, asked the seasoned military man to take full command of a new Union army to defend the Capital and preserve the Union against the confiscations of the Confederacy on government property. Lee spent nearly a week up there on the hill, in lonely isolation, considering the generous offer of President Lincoln. But his love for his native Virginia prevailed. He could not imagine a day when he could mount an eventual campaign against his fellow Virginians. He declined Lincoln’s invitation, and instead took command of the Virginia naval forces, and in a short time became the President’s adversary and chief nemesis. Jefferson Davis convinced Robert E. Lee to take full command of the Confederate forces, which he did with brilliant strategy and deadly effectiveness. It was Lee who marched north, wreaking havoc all the way to Gettysburg, and only there, in a terrible fight that could have gone either way, was he turned back.
Lee and his wife abandoned their Virginia estate on the Potomac, never to return. Back in Washington, the West Point graduate was scorned as a traitor. Using a minor infraction of delinquent back taxes as an excuse, the house and land were confiscated by the Union Government. To be sure the Lees would never again occupy the house, several hundred of the Union Army’s dead were buried out back. It was an act of contempt, and it worked.
After the signing of the full surrender of the Confederacy across the table from his counterpart, General Ulysses S. Grant, in a farm house in Appomattox, General Lee withdrew into a dark seclusion, never to reclaim his beloved property, never to return to the house on the hill. He lived only six more years.
Several of Lee’s descendents sued the government in court and won back the land and the house. Once the ownership issues were settled, the Lee Estate was sold back to the Federal government, and Arlington Cemetery was born.
Several hundred thousand of America’s most revered citizens are buried there, including Carolyn’s Uncle Donald.
* * * * * * *
There is
a pristine white marble tomb, also in a conspicuous place, above ground, just
outside a Roman style pavilion, also on a hill, also overlooking the city. A
solitary soldier, in full formal dress, armed with a rifle and bayonet, marches
back and forth, crossing on a well worn path in a precision march, standing
guard, a sentinel, protecting the remains and memory of the one buried there.
On the side of the tomb, these words are inscribed in the stone: “HERE RESTS IN HONORED GLORY AN AMERICAN SOLDIER KNOWN BUT TO GOD.”
The United States of America is not the first country to so honor an Unknown Soldier. Throughout history, nations (England, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy and others) have recognized that in the tragic losses on the battlefield, some have fallen without even the possibility of identification and a proper memorial. In the helter-skelter of battle, when bullets fly in every direction, and legions of infantry run here and there, and the casualties are high, bodies may not even be counted. In the carnage of the Civil War, boys became men in the heat of conflict, and many fell with no name. But every human being has a story. Everyone is known to someone. There may be no more painful loss than to never know when or why or where or how, only that he is gone. She is gone. Never to come home.
But those of us who believe in purpose can not imagine a world where sacrifice and duty and loyalty and courage and valor go unnoticed. Even the nameless will be remembered. There is among us an undying awareness that the joys and pleasures of our life today were paid for by the blood and sweat and groaning of those who died in liberty’s cause.
So a sentinel stands guard at the tomb. Not a detail or a step or a movement of the gun is unscripted. And when the soldier completes his assigned post, another, equally prepared emerges, and under the command of an officer, takes the place of the other and gives him rest.
As I stood at the Tomb of the Unknowns on the marble steps in a light breeze, my camera at the ready, in a quiet crowd of onlookers in the silence of Arlington, and the scent of cherry blossoms in the air under a gray sky, the sound of steel taps on the boots, snapping out each turn of the marching soldier, for the official Changing of the Guard, I had to stop the picture taking and listen. And watch. And think.
It seemed so timely. At the command of the officer, we all stood. A cool mist turned to sprinkle, a light rain, and the rifle turned over from one uniformed man to another. And in the changing of the guard, in the presence of the Unknown, in the full color of spring, a mysterious knot tightened in my throat and my eyes went moist, and for one brief moment in time, I think I got it.
Freedom isn’t free.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
Carolyn and I stepped into the visitor’s center at Arlington, and she punched in her uncle’s name at the computer. The printer produced a map with the location of his gravesite, and in the rain, under a borrowed umbrella, we walked alone through acres of grave markers, all bearing the name of someone with a story to tell, through the blossoming cherry trees and dogwood, the tulips of red and orange and white, and azaleas and daffodils and yellow dandelions popping up through the grass, and finally, we found it.
DONALD H STUVE
US ARMY
JAN 2 1924
DEC 20 2001
PURPLE HEART
This is no stranger. He’s one of us.
A squadron of fighter jets roared overhead in the missing man formation. Up the hill that same afternoon, they buried a fighter pilot who just this month, died in combat somewhere over Iraq.
You know it, too. You agree with me. Lives have meaning. And purpose. Maybe you are thinking now of someone who brought meaning and purpose to your life, but today there is a void that still aches. Because he is gone now. She is gone now.
Take time to remember.
Your life means something, too.
Live it out.
With courage. In a noble cause.
Willing to sacrifice.
Willing to give.
Posted in Washington DC
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2003
Special Thanks to my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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