I visited my Army brothers down in the Deep Southeast today, as has been my tradition this day for the past several years.
The big graveyard on the slopes of Mt. Scott hasn't changed. It was just like it always is, neat, tidy, orderly, quiet. Everything, in other words, that war and fighting are not. We like our wars to be distant and iconic, if we can make them so, and so Willamette National Cemetery plays its part.
Today was, as it always is, busy. Cars and truck-loads of families coming to visit their lost ones, "...not gone but marching far away". Older adults my age visiting parents of my parents generation, middle-aged kids of Vietnam-era parents, and young adults or actual kids who looked mostly to be grandkids or even great grandkids of the people who were there waiting silently for their living remainders.
The absence of truly young adults, the peers of the young men and women whose stone dates ended in our recent wars, was marked; at least I marked it. We've managed to make our dead disappear much as we made them disappear while they lived and fought the wars we wanted kept out of our lives.
I had to walk among the dead for a bit, not an unpleasant task on a warm spring day in a pretty garden spot, until I found one of my own generation; another platoon daddy, SFC Groome, who was only four years older than me but had done much hard service in the Gulf Wars. He'd also died a dozen years earlier, so it seemed like a good spot to stop and share a drink.
It wasn't a Bud or a Rainier pounder - when I go visit the dead I tend to drink like a grunt - but it was a fine malty draft, and after sharing I sat with him a while. I hoped he'd had a good life. I also apologized for the Iraq service his stone testified; for not being a better citizen and letting fools and knaves abuse his trust.
I hoped that he'd had a decent tour, had time for a laugh or two, and had come home sound. And wished him a loving family to come and visit him now and then, to remember fondly his empty chair, and to keep his spirit alive in their hearts.
On the way back to the little Prius parked up the hill two lovely douce matrons asked me to take their photo; it seemed odd to want to pose over someone's grave, but they were kindly and I was obliging, so I snapped off some shots and made sure they checked their camera to ensure I'd done right. They thanked me sweetly, we exchanged courtesies amongst the orderly dead, and I resumed my climb, back to the car, then back down the hill, then back across the cloud-dappled Portland Monday to North and home.
As always on this day I felt ever more disconnected and adrift from the country that made this day a holiday for me and mine.
Every year it seems less and less the country I'd hoped for when I was young and strong and proud in my own Army blue.
Yet.
As always today;
