with love and honor
can be seen in a a piece in today's Washington Post titled Americans gave their lives to defeat the Nazis. The Dutch have never forgotten.
It is about an American cemetery in the small Dutch community of Margraten.
Consider the first two paragraphs:
They haven’t forgotten. For 70 years, the Dutch have come to a verdant U.S. cemetery outside this small village to care for the graves of Americans killed in World War II.
On Sunday, they came again, bearing Memorial Day bouquets for men and women they never knew, but whose 8,300 headstones the people of the Netherlands have adopted as their own.
This is a story that should move you.
Allow me to offer two more paragraphs above the fold, and restrict my comments beneath the cheese-doodle, so if you want you can ignore them.
For Arthur Chotin, 70, who had come from Annapolis, Md., to finally meet the couple caring for his father’s resting place, the devotion of the Dutch was a source of awe.
“What would cause a nation recovering from losses and trauma of their own to adopt the sons and daughters of another nation?” asked Chotin, the only American descendant to speak on Sunday. “And what would keep that commitment alive for all of these years, when the memory of that war has begun to fade? It is a unique occurrence in the history of civilization.”
I do have words of my own below, if you are interested.
I served, during a time of a conflict - Vietnam - but never in combat.
I look back at my ancestors, who first arrived in this nation in 1862, with the bulk coming later - in the 1880s and then in the early years of the last century. The earliest military service was one great-uncle who served as a doctor in what was then known as the Great War. Of the generation in front of me my father served in the Navy in the Bureau of Ships here in Washington DC, while both of my mother's siblings served - both her brother and her sister. I believe two of my father's brothers served as well.
In my generation, with four male and two female cousins on the paternal side and three male and one female cousin on the paternal side, I am the only one to serve in uniform, although one cousin now deceased was a civilian employee of the military for much of his career.
For my generation we did not confront a military conflict of the weight of the 2nd World War, where the entire population was mobilized.
I look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which I have had students serve (the oldest of those I taught are now in their 30s, and one who is in a non-regular army military police unit did 5 tours in Iraq), and I see a very different society. I read Restoring Memoriam to Memorial Day by Charles M. Blow in today's New York Times and note the following quote he offers from USA Today:
“In 2013, just 19 percent of the 535 combined members in the U.S. House and Senate will have active-duty military service on their résumé, down from a peak in 1977 when 80 percent of lawmakers boasted military service.”
Right above that Blow writes
President Obama isn’t a military veteran, nor are many of the presidential hopefuls who have declared or might declare a run for the White House in 2016.
Hillary Clinton, Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders have never served. Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina and Bobby Jindal have not either. Only Rick Perry, Lindsey Graham and Jim Webb have.
Were that lack of service a reflection of America not being involved in conflicts, as we have been for so much of our history, it would be a positive sign.
Instead it is a reflection of something troubling: that increasingly we are becoming a nation where despite our continuing conflicts a decreasing percentage of our population serves, and we are developing an alienation between an increasing professional and sometime self-perpetuating military class (especially true of the officer corps) and a civilian population that does not bear the burdens of service.
Further, the lack of service of so many, particularly in the political class but in the population as well, makes resistance to military adventurism more difficult to develop and sustain: in my generation, the fact that Vietnam was fought with a draft had a great deal to do with the building resistance to that misguided in so many ways conflict.
This day SHOULD serve as a reminder of the cost of war. That cost starts with those whose lives are lost and those whose bodies and minds are shattered as one of the prices we pay. It is the loss of family connection. It is the taking of economic activity and turning it away from productive use that benefits us all as a society and using it for what is often the destruction of other societies - the cost of World War II was devastating in much of Europe. We now are shocked by the destructiveness of the Taliban or of ISIS, while forgetting that in order to defeat Hitler and the Japanese we laid waste to entire cities with carpet-bombing and firebombing, well before we had the capability of instantaneous city-wide eradication like that we released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We now argue about the "collateral damage" of drone strikes while forgetting the far greater damage done by long-distance artillery in previous wars, or of the aerial attacks I have just mentioned, where hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, even more than a hundred thousand, might die in a single attack.
I am now a Convinced Friend, one who in most circumstances will oppose the use of force, although I will not hesitate to use deadly force if necessary to protect the students in my care.
And yet, I recognize that sometimes there is no choice. I have often written here about the words of a man I greatly respect, who as a monk on Mount Athos during World War II heard only bits and pieces about the great war then raging around the World, and who prayed that the less evil side might win, a recognition of the evil inevitably a part of even the most righteous and justifiable military endeavor.
The people in that small Dutch village rightly saw what the American troops buried in their town were doing, the sacrifices they were making, and how they the Dutch were benefiting.
They gave back what they could, honoring the memory of those soldiers, taking on the sacred task of decorating their final resting places.
I live in Arlington VA. It is the home of the nation's most reknown military cemetery, established as an act of revenge by an Army Quartermaster who had seized the property of Robert E. Lee and wanting to punish that officer for the choice of going with his native Virginia rather than the national Army that had been his career.
I drive by it every day on my way to school.
I have directed the singing there at burials/graveside services for people of the Orthodox Christian faith when I was a choir director in an Orthodox Church.
I have attended the burial of the father of a good friend.
It is a very moving place, row upon row of graves, even when each is not decorated with an American flag planted thereupon as is the case this weekend.
When I want to remember the cost, however, I cross the river to a black wall containing the names of those who died in the conflict of my generation. I served stateside, but there are names thereupon of people I knew, having done bootcamp and/or infantry training regiment with then, or whom I knew at Quantico before they went (back) to Vietnam. There is a different kind of decoration - of medals from others, of photographs, of childhood items. One can go to the Museum of American History on the Mall and see selections of those offerings, which unlike flowers do not eventually wilt.
Still, the greatest offering is of memory, and in the Netherlands we read how that is passed from generation to generation, a sacred responsibility.
My political activism began with Civil Rights. I can remember that the murdered Medgar Evers was a veteran of WWII, that James Meredith had served in the military before he became the first Black at the University of Mississippi. I knew growing up that Jackie Robinson had been courtmartialed for refusing to give up his seat on a bus. I knew that we could require Blacks to serve on behalf of what we claimed to be our national interest, but then deny them equality at home.
My political activism continued to be shaped by the experience of Vietnam, even though I chose to enlist, despite opposing the war.
The Dutch in that small village honor those who died in a necessary war.
In remembering and honoring the dead we should not pick and choose among the wars, because for many they have a commitment despite the nature of the conflict. That is as true today as it was in many of our previous conflicts.
We can oppose the war in which they serve while honoring their willingness to serve and sacrifice.
Today is a day of memory.
I looked at the Blow column. It is good.
I read the piece on the cemetery in Margraten. I was moved enough to post this piece.
If you have chosen to read my words, thank you.
Honor the willingness to serve for a cause greater than oneself, even if you disagree with the cause.
And hope and pray that when we do ask people to die in a conflict that we may be as we were in the 1940s the less evil side.
Peace.