The only official national cemetery in Portland is down in the deepest Southeast, home of the New Copper Penny and every third you-pull-it junkyard in the metro region, so it was to there that I sailed down I-205 on a sunny morning to have the drink with the dead I share on this day.
Like every military cemetery I've every walked in Willamette is overwhelmingly tidy, dominated by the dress-right-dress-and-cover-down orderliness that we're taught in our training, as if by the sheer force of design and construction it can overwhelm the bizarre and random nature that has been what happens every time people have met each other with deadly force since the first homo erectus picked up a rock.
Willamette is perfect for that peaceful illusion. It sprawls high over the northern slope of Mount Scott, and the wooded hillside lifts you far above the workaday grime of the Southeast.
Especially on a gorgeous early summer Monday the hillside really is perfect; shining green grass curving away with the tiny forest of red-white-and-blue flags (interrupted by the white service banner of the Coast Guard - for some reason the Coasties have sent their flag-planters out to set their dead apart from the uniform ranks and files of flat stones around them) disappearing into the dark green firs that shade the older subdivisions that surround the field, and beyond that the skyline of Portland under a bright blue sky.
Up on this shining hillside there's no fear. No hate, or boredom, no frustration, or anger, not even the exaltation of rage and the power of holding life and death in your hand that war can bring. None of the things that make war what it is, so great and terrible.
There's nothing but a sort of unreflecting quiet, where the hiss of tires and the sound of the wind that stirs the thousands of tiny flags are only passing thoughts.
I've parked at the bottom of the hill, and my knees are bitching at me for that as I climb between the rows of stone.
The remnants around me are almost all from my parents' generation.
That's the thought that follows me up that green, green hill; how many people buried here lived through the last Big War. No wonder we're still followed by their unquiet ghosts, even today.
They're all "veterans", though. Survivors. The dates end in the Eighties and Nineties and Oughts, the time of the dying-off of the generation that saw so much war; Europe and the Pacific in World War II, Korea, Vietnam.
The war dead of our small wars are tucked away in Sections X, Y, and Z, lost amid the crowded memorials of the older generations. They seem to have more flowers and other mementos of living grief, raw and unassuaged. The families walking among them are younger, with only the occasional middle-aged father or mother to remind us that the tragedy of war is that, soldier or civilian, American or German or Iraqi or Vietnamese, fathers and mothers bury their sons and daughters.
Maybe it's the oppressive orderliness. Maybe it's just me; maybe I've lived too long with the weird not-war warring my country has waged that makes me feel so hollow and unmoored. I share a whiskey with my dead brothers, but I don't feel the connection I usually do to them this day. My pledge seems empty.
I trudge slowly back down the hill wondering what it means, this day, to my country, to me.
What does it mean? To die in a war that your own people don't understand, that to the vast crowd of them is no more than a noise just below the range of human hearing, a fire far away that is no more than a sullen glow on a dim horizon, utterly distant from the shining green hill and the blue skies dreaming over the peaceful city below?
I'm troubled, because I just don't know.
It's still a lovely morning all the way back up the freeway and then the busy side streets back to North Portland. There are lines at the Starbucks and wheelbarrows creaking through the rock and gravel store, and mattresses on sale, and the busy life of a big city goes on below that shining green hill and those tiny bright flags stirring softly on the warm breeze that carries me home.
As always on this day: this.
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