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Small Flags

[Seattle, 2007] The cemetery at the top of Queen Anne in Seattle is busy this weekend. This even though a cemetery under all circumstances is seldom thought of as a busy place. We haven’t had busy cemeteries since 1945. Since then the long peace and its sleep were only briefly, for a few years every now and then, interrupted by a small war. The cemeteries fill up more slowly now than ever before. And our sleep, regardless of continuing alarms, deepens.

These days we resent, it seems, having them fill our cemeteries at all, clinging to our tiny lives with a passion that passes all understanding; clinging to our large liberty with the belief that all payments on such a loan will be interest-free and deferred for at least 100 years.

Still, the cemetery at the top of Queen Anne does tend to take on a calm, resigned bustle over Memorial Day weekend, as the decreasing number of families who have lost members to war come to decorate the graves of those we now so delicately refer to as “The Fallen.” They are not, of course, fallen in the sense that they will, suddenly and to our utter surprise, get up. That they will never do in this world. For they are not “The Fallen,” they are “The Dead.”

In the cemetery at the end of my street, of course, all the permanent residents are dead. But those who are among the war dead, or among those who served in a war, are easily found on this day by the small American flags their loved ones who still survive place and refresh. In this cemetery atop Queen Anne hill in Seattle, the small flags grow fewer and smaller with each passing year. It is not, of course, that the size of the sacrifice has been reduced. That remains the largest gift one free man may give to the country that sustained him. It is instead the regard of the country for whom the sacrifices were made that has gotten smaller, eroded by the self-love that the secular celebrate above all other values.

As you walk about the green lawn and weave among the markers, the slight breeze moves the small three-colored flags. Some are tattered and faded. Some are wound around the small gold sticks that hold them up. You straighten these out almost as an afterthought. Then the breeze unfurls them.

Here and there, people tend the grave of this or that loved one; weeding, washing, or otherwise making the gradually fading marks in the stone clear under the sky. Cars pull in and wind slow, careful on the curves, and park almost at random. An old woman emerges from one, a father and son from another, an entire family from yet another. They carry flowers in bunches or potted and, at times, gardening implements and a bucket for carrying away the weeds. It’s a quiet morning. Nobody is in a hurry to arrive and once arrived to leave.

When I lived in Villers-Cotteret , between Compaigne and Soissons, along the Western Front in France, the cemeteries were as quiet but on a scale difficult to imagine unless they were seen.

In the Battle of Soissons in July of 1918, 12,000 men (Americans and Germans) were killed in four days. Vast crops of white crosses sprouted from the fields their rows and columns fading into the distance as they marched back from the roadside like an army of the dead called to attention until the end of time. American cemeteries merged with French cemeteries that merged with German cemeteries; their only distinction being the flags that flew over what one took to be the center of the arrangement. I suppose one could find out the number of graves in these serried ranks. Somewhere they keep the count. Governments are especially good at counting. But it is enough to know they are beyond numbering by an individual; that the mind would cease before the final number was reached.

To have even a hundredth of those cemeteries in the United States now would be more than we, as a nation, could bear. It would not be so much the dead within it, but the truth that made it happen that would be unbearable. This is, of course, what we are as a nation fiddling about with on this Memorial Day. We count our war dead daily now, but we count mostly on the fingers of one hand, at times on two. Never in numbers now beyond our ability to imagine. This is not because we cannot die daily in large numbers in a war. September 11th proved to us that we still die in the thousands, but many among us cannot now hold that number as a reality, but only as a “tragic” exception that need not have happened and will — most likely — never happen again.

That, at least, is the mindset that I assume when I read how the “War on Terror” is but a bumper strip. In a way, that’s preferable to the mindset that now, in increasing numbers among us, prefers to take refuge in the unbalanced belief that 9/11 was actually something planned and executed by the American government. Why many of my fellow Americans prefer this “explanation” is something that I once felt was beyond comprehension. Now I see it is just another comfortable position taken up by those for whom the habits of automatic treason have become just another fashionable denigration of the country that has made their liberty to believe the worst of it not only possible but popular.

Like the graves in my local cemetery, these souls too bear within them a small flag, but that flag — unlike their souls — is white and, in its increasing rootedness in our body politic signals not sacrifice for the advancement of the American experiment, but the abject surrender of their lives to small spites and the tiny victories of lifestyle liberation.

In the cemetery at the end of my street, there are a few small flags. There are many more graves with no flag at all, but they are the ones that the few small flags made possible. Should the terrible forests of white crosses ever bloom across our landscape — as once they did during the Civil War — it will not be because we had too few of those small, three-colored flags, but because we became a nation with far too many white ones.

[Originally published Memorial Day, 2007]

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Monty James May 26, 2018, 9:43 AM

    Thanks for this, Gerard. Reposted over at the Moron Horde.

  • Casey Klahn May 26, 2018, 5:40 PM

    I thought it was curtains for AD, again, this morning. Keep pissing them off, but do stay above water. We need this too much!

  • ghostsniper May 26, 2018, 7:48 PM

    Got my poppy this morning from the old soldier outside the grocery store and I gave him an extra 10 spot that was wasting time in the corner of my wallet.

    Then I went inside and was acosted by a couple male tweens selling mom-made bakery items for the, get this, girl scouts. Other than the few mom’s there were no girls in sight. No I didn’t buy any of that stuff.

    But I did march right back to the frozen foods dept and latch onto a giant Marie Callender Key Lime Pie and I just now finished a huge slab of it. First Key Lime I’ve had since I left Florida more than 12 years ago. I won’t wait 12 years for the next one.

  • Jaynie May 27, 2018, 4:26 AM

    Thanks for this reposted article. Verklempt. Lost my Dad last July, 92 years old. Tomorrow the Pvt. Charles J. Shutt Marine Corps League Detachment will hold a small ceremony for those USMC members having left this mortal coil this past year. I suppose it’ll be the final formal ceremony in which he will be honored. I do believe he must be among the last of the WWII veterans since he enlisted young.

    He left high school and required his parents written permission to enlist. His story was that they originally told him no, but then he made their lives miserable, so then they signed the letter with pleasure! Off he went with a bunch of his pals. Once he arrived in Parris Island and training began, he wrote a letter accusing them of all sorts of bad intentions for signing his permission and begging to come home. Things got tougher too. During the war, he was called back to the states from the Pacific for some type of training and his group then proceeded to Okinawa where every last one of them perished. One of the harshest things I’ve heard.

    He was an outstanding man, my ballast, and I miss him every day.

    In 2013, my husband took my son, my Dad and me on the Footsteps of Patton tour. Fantastic trip. My Dad worried he’d not be physically up to the rigors of the trip, but he was super. The guides and many museums along the tour treated him, as a WWII veteran, so special it was wonderful. The reason I bring this up is to remark upon our visits in France to the enormous, vast cemeteries overlooking the ocean, as in this post.

    We were moved, but one can only imagine what my Dad was going through as his thoughts were was brought back to the tumultuous time of war, a half a world away, of his youth.

  • Missy May 27, 2018, 10:02 AM

    My husband lies beneath a military issue bronze burial marker (name, dates, rank, a cross and “Vietnam”) in a pretty and quiet rural cemetery. It is hard to put into words the feeling of seeing a new, crisp flag on his grave each Memorial Day weekend. It is emotional but always good.

    Jayne, I was struck by your comment, “He was an outstanding man, my ballast, and I miss him every day.”

  • Fletcher Christian May 27, 2018, 11:19 AM

    Yes, we need a new memorial for the ever-increasing numbers of dead (civilian and military) in the newest phase of the 1400-year war.

    A glowing, glass-lined crater where Riyadh used to be would do nicely.

  • Rob De Witt May 27, 2018, 12:06 PM

    Jayne, what a beautiful and moving tribute to your father and the life he lived. How lucky he was to have such a long life, and such a loving daughter.

    My dad lies in one of those fields of white crosses in France. I never knew him and I feel the loss every day.

  • Casey Klahn May 27, 2018, 3:12 PM

    My respects and compliments to the readers here whose loved ones died in service. God bless you.

  • Snakepit Kansas May 28, 2018, 6:16 AM

    28MAY is the day my cousin’s Blackhawk crashed in Afghanistan. It was his second combat tour. He survived with a broken pelvis, back and other significant injuries. He received a medical discharge several months after being in the hospital. He looks fine walking around but I cringe watching him getting into a pickup truck.

    Dad joined the Air Force at 17 and worked on B-47 Bombers. He is quickly coming up on 79 and his sharp mind and strong body are fading. He was also my beacon and constant source for advice. I realized some years ago how much my life has mimicked his. I can only hope I can equally do the same for my son.

    My family will be visiting the Corregidor Philippines battleground in a few weeks. Being there prior and knowing I was standing where at one time it was likely ankle deep in blood, made you know it was hallowed ground.

    Ghost, thanks for your service, even if you don’t necessarily want to hear it.

  • ghostsniper May 28, 2018, 11:17 AM

    Thanks Snake.
    I’d do it again under the right circumstances.

  • John the River May 24, 2019, 6:00 AM

    ” A Find A Grave photo request has just been made in your area. If you are able to take this photograph, please read the ‘Instructions for Photographers’ paragraph at the end of this email.”

    Name: Edmond J Harvey (unknown – Jan. 14, 1945)

    Several years ago, after receiving this email, I set out to photograph this man’s resting place. Shortly afterwards I sent this email back.

    “I’ve just received the location information about this grave.
    Returning veterans bodies whose families could not afford a grave-site were buried in the veterans section (2). Within the cemetery that is between Immaculate Conception Ave. and St. Francis Ave., beyond that there was no record of the row or plot as the men were buried as they came back. “

    Section two was about two acres, I came to find that the majority of the WWII graves had only a flat, 12″x5″ rectangular stone marker with Name, Date and Unit. I walked every inch of that section, but I never found “Edmond J Harvey”. I did find a number of stone markers after going to unmarked areas when the spacing should have had a grave and dug around under the sod until I found the buried markers. By rain and snow and growing grass did disappear the markers of forgotten men, those whose families had moved away or never thought to maintain their resting place.

    The next Memorial Day (aka Decoration Day), overcast and rainy, I rather self-consciously walked to the middle of the field in an area without visible markers or headstones, and placed a small batch of flowers alone on the wet ground. Edmond J Harvey is there, somewhere, and on each Memorial Day since as I go by that place I think about him and whisper a short prayer. For all the forgotten men.

  • Joe Krill May 24, 2019, 2:06 PM

    I have had this on the back of my business card for well over 40 years.
    WHY?
    Why do we wait till a person’s gone before we tell them their worth?
    Why do we wait, why not tell them now they are the finest person on earth?
    Why do we wait until a person’s gone to send them flowers galore
    When a single rose would have meant so much if we’d taken it to their door?
    Why do we wait till they cannot hear the good things that we might say?
    Why put it off, why not tell them now and share in their joy today?
    Of course we’re busy, that’s our excuse, but why, oh why do we wait
    To tell a person our love for them until it becomes too late?

  • Terry May 24, 2019, 2:37 PM

    My service was during Vietnam. Horrible waste of wonderful friends. No reason for that.

    My father was a WWII B17 pilot flying left seat at 19 years of youth. Eighth Air Force out of Lakenheath, England. He flew close air support in Korea. Was shot down in North Korea just a few miles from the Yalu river. Escaped capture by fleeing with co-pilot and jumping into the Yalu and floating down stream to allied lines. There were several Chinese troops in pursuit the whole time until the river jump. Treated like trash by the US government.

    My father is alive and in relatively good shape at 93 years of age. He will be 94 on June 10th, God permitting. I love him dearly.

  • Casey Klahn May 25, 2019, 6:41 AM

    Terry!

    My compliments and respects.

    In a couple of weeks I’ll be in New Mexico, where lives my friend whose father went ashore on D Day, Normandy. She needs a bottle of something, I think. He is the one who jumped into the water, over the side of the HB, on order, and started to drown. That’s a metaphor for what all soldiers do in war.

  • Skorpion May 25, 2019, 5:14 PM

    Pops fought in the Korean War, as part of the US Army 40th Infantry Division. He was fairly close-mouthed about his experiences there, although he did mention being moved into a combat zone that a previous force had failed to secure, and seeing a truckload piled with dead teenage Marines driving out of the area. Another time he and his squad got into a firefight with Chinese and Nork troops, and when they won, and advanced on the area, he passed the corpse of an Asian soldier who couldn’t have been more than thirteen years old.
    War is Hell, folks. Sometimes it’s necessary. But it’s always Hell.
    Respect to the men and women who fell.

  • Snakepit Kansas May 25, 2019, 5:31 PM

    Nice repost. I hope to see it annually.

  • ghostsniper May 24, 2020, 4:23 AM

    Snake sed: “Nice repost. I hope to see it annually.”
    ==========
    Here we are, a whole nuther year has gone by.
    Reflect on what is the same, and what is different.
    We are planets to each other, drifting in a brief eclipse,
    each of us a world apart,
    alone and yet together like two passing ships.

  • gwbnyc May 30, 2021, 8:57 AM

    there’s busy and there’s busy.

    my county/Vietnam Conflict

    https://www.honorstates.org/index.php?do=q&state=OH&county=Lake&war=Vietnam+Conflict&p=1

    52.

    two listed were “neighbor boys from down the street”.

  • Daniel K Day May 30, 2021, 12:20 PM

    My father joined the merchant marine on his seventeenth birthday, January 19, 1944, then the Navy on his eighteenth birthday. Two boot camps. After his training in spring, 1945, his ship sailed to Pearl Harbor, and then westward. The day after they left Pearl Harbor, the war ended.
    Thanks to the atomic bomb, he never needed to see action… but he had volunteered to, and would have, if the bombs had fizzled. He got very lucky. Recognized as a World War II veteran, he is buried in Fort Logan National Cemetary, Denver, CO.

  • rabbit tobacco May 30, 2021, 7:41 PM

    A poem by Major Michael Davis O’Donnell, January 1, 1970, Dak To, Vietnam :
    If you are able, save for them a place inside of you
    and save one backward glance when you are leaving
    for the places they can no longer go.

    Be not ashamed to say you loved them,
    though you may not have always.

    Take what they have left and what they have taught you with their dying
    and keep it with your own.

    And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane,
    take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind.

  • Brooks Goode May 30, 2021, 11:38 PM

    At the north end of Lakeview Cemetery there is an obelisk dedicated to Civil War veterans.

    • Dirk May 30, 2022, 7:07 PM

      I just happen to be camped about one mile towards Bend from that Grave yard in Lakeview. Not being local, had no idea. will check it out in the morning. I find grave yards peaceful, I’ve walked the Vietnam section before.

      The deadliest sniper in Vietnam was from Lakeview Ore. was a forestry employee after, Chuck M? If he’s still here I can’t find him.

  • Tiger Stripe LRRP May 30, 2022, 3:12 AM

    Meanwhile the Fremont area of Seattle has a 16foot bronze statue of Lenin.

  • steveaz May 30, 2022, 6:40 AM

    Rumor has it, no one living in the Seattle area can be buried in the Queen Anne cemetery.

    That’s sad, if true. Hic’up.

    • Vanderleun May 30, 2022, 8:12 AM

      Not true. The cemetary is still taking guests.

    • Daniel K Day May 30, 2022, 8:34 PM

      “no one living in the Seattle area”
      Aren’t they supposed to be dead first?
      I’ll let myself out.

  • captflee May 30, 2022, 10:42 AM

    Just returned home from the tiny local National Cemetery and our county’s Memorial Day remembrance ceremonies. Dwelling a single block away, if not away at sea I have over the decades generally managed to prod myself to attend, so have been able to track the gradual diminution of the audience. Today the couple of hundred were able to gather in the shade of a handful of magnificent oaks. The WWII and Korea vets seem to have faded away, or are perhaps too frail to take the heat (two attendees being ambulanced away in the first half hour alone), and the Viet Nam cohort’s ranks are beginning to show some serious attrition. A few younger Iraq and Afghan vets, accompanied by their offspring, provided some hope for the future, which was most welcome, as the complex, often contradictory emotions stirred up by these observances all too often take me in the direction of, “As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood. ”
    Be that as it may, it is well that at least some tiny remnant of our stricken civilization is able and willing to remember with profound appreciation the sacrifices made by the few.

  • ThisIsNotNutella May 30, 2022, 2:58 PM

    Remember the USS Liberty 55th Anniversary on June 8, too.

    https://honorlibertyvets.org/

    In China, nothing happened on June 4, 1989. Don’t be like China.

  • TANSTAFL May 30, 2022, 4:41 PM

    Oh! you who sleep in Flanders Fields,
    Sleep sweet – to rise anew!
    We caught the torch you threw
    And holding high, we keep the Faith
    With All who died.

    We cherish, too, the poppy red
    That grows on fields where valor led;
    It seems to signal to the skies
    That blood of heroes never dies,
    But lends a lustre to the red
    Of the flower that blooms above the dead
    In Flanders Fields.

    And now the Torch and Poppy Red
    We wear in honor of our dead.
    Fear not that ye have died for naught;
    We’ll teach the lesson that ye wrought
    In Flanders Fields.

    – Moina Michael (the mother of the Poppy)

    AND TO MY 1/9th AIR CAV BROTHERS:

    To fallen soldiers let us sing
    Where no rockets fly nor bullets wing
    Our broken brothers let us bring
    To the Mansions of the Lord.

    No more bleeding, no more fight
    No prayers pleading through the night
    Just divine embrace, eternal light
    In the Mansions of the Lord.

    Where no mothers cry and no children weep
    We will stand and guard though the angels sleep
    Through the ages safely keep
    The Mansions of the Lord