It was...well, you know what it was, because I do this every year, and if you're one of the few people still reading this (and, yes, that "few" is my own fault for being a Bad Blogger and not posting more content. I get it.) you've read these Memorial Day posts and know where I go and what I do.
The big burying ground was its usual serene and manicured self. The visitors were sparse, as always in the early morning, although a bit more numerous in the newer, outer areas, where more of the dead from what I think of as "my generation" of wars are buried.
Still vastly out-buried by the crowd from the mid-Twentieth-Century wars, mind. As the generation born in the 1920s and 30's goes down to the grave in hastening numbers the space for my people, the younger troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (and the other farcical imperial adventures like my own Caribbean vacation of 1983 or Panama in 1989), is grossly over-filled with our parents or grandparents.
So much so that I was almost shocked to find someone who was actually killed in Iraq, a Marine staff sergeant whose luck finally ran out on his third tour in June of 2007.
I took the time to look him up; when he bought the farm he was working as a bomb-disposal guy, presumably hunting for IEDs. His obit said he'd joined as a 17-year-old kid who had wanted to be a rodeo bull rider and Marine, had volunteered for the 2336 MOS after a bunch of embassy guard tours, and had ended up in Anbar Province where some anonymous muj had built for him a bull he couldn't ride.
As always, I poured out a beer to him and all my brothers; not gone, just marching far away, and explaining that I'd be there soon; sooner than I'd hoped, anyway.
And, as always, I apologized, for not being a better citizen and keeping them from wasting years or their lives in pointless wars in distant places because I'd let the lies and foolishness and stupidity and evil of my "leaders" go unpunished.
I mourned for them, and for myself, that the ideals and illusions they and I had been raised on - of our country and our people - had turned out to be nonsense, a tissue of credulous fables spun around promises We the People had never fought and worked hard enough to redeem.
And then I left.
Down the green and shining hill, up onto the freeway that took me back through the busy outlands of southeast then northeast Portland to the patch of grown-over waste ground that is now the Whittaker Pond greenspace, where I took up my binoculars and spent a quiet hour looking and listening.
To the sounds of wind and water. To the hushed noises of business and traffic. To the quiet life of the city around me, doing it's daily business through wars and rumors of wars.
And then I went home.
Don't get me wrong.
I'm still incandescent with rage at the wreckage the parcel of greedy fools led by a bloated moron has done to my nation. I'm still fulminating because of the betrayal of people like me, soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines - and all those we have been and will be sent to kill and maim - who have been and will be carelessly tossed in harm's way for a bump of the Dow or some AI-slop social media shit.
But I'm still here.
Not dead yet.
And as I promised my brothers; if I can summon the sheer gall and anger to be there to piss on all their graves, every one of the sonsofbitches?
I will.
Until then?
Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few,
And they're all dead.
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As always on this day; this.
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