My first since retirement, and so freighted with a very odd feeling of ordinariness; when every day is a holiday none are.
Instead of choosing to make the long drive down to Willamette National Cemetery I left the quiet house and crossed the big river into Washington, to the little graveyard outside the old Vancouver Barracks.
The old post cemetery isn't the original burying ground set aside in the 1840s. That space was built over when the post expanded in the 1880s and as many of the bones as could be found were removed to the current location, just north of the busy street that is 4th Plain Drive.
It's a very odd little spot. There's a couple of paved loops but no parking area, giving a weird "drive-through" feel to the place. Like everyone else, I just pulled the little car off the road in as gentle a fashion as possible to spend some time with the dead.
As always in these federal plots, the identical stones testify a wide variety of shades; obviously GIs and their families, but also the legacy of the frontier post - civilians working for the Army, traders and travelers, native (probably) laborers. There's even a handful of POWs from the Second World War, German and Italian prisoners buried far from their homes.
I did the same thing I always do.
Wandered among the gravestones, nodding to the GIs as I passed, pouring out a libation in their memory. Most of those buried around me appeared to be guys who'd died between the big wars, in the 1920s ans 1930s, veterans and timeservers alike only in sharing the Army blue or khaki, or OD green. Or the tree suit I wore at the end of my time.
As so often these latter days, I felt the slow loss of the kinship I once felt with my nation and my service. That We the People had soldiers fighting overseas seemed like another age instead of just two years ago.
At the end of my stroll I found myself next to what remained of 1SG Ewart, who'd been topkick in the 1st Infantry back in the day. It seemed like an old First Shirt would be a good sort of person to entrust a cold beer, so I left mine with him and turned for home, my moment with the dead done and another lazy retired sort of day before me.
I'm no longer certain what this day means, to me and to my nation. We seem more than ever a house divided against ourselves.
Yet.
As always today;
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