Burying military dead with honors is not a recent practice. Thucydides' account of the funerary rites of warriors who died in the Peloponnesian War reads as though it could have appeared in The New York Times:
"In the same winter the Athenians gave a funeral at the public cost to those who had fallen in this war. It was a custom of their ancestors, and the manner of it is as follows. Three days before the ceremony, the bones of the dead are laid out in a tent which has been erected; and their friends bring to their relatives such offerings as they please. In the funeral procession cypress coffins are borne in cars, one for each tribe, the bones of the deceased being placed in the coffin of their tribe. Among these is carried an empty bier decked for the missing, that is, for those whose bodies could not be recovered. Any citizen or stranger who pleases joins in the procession, and the female relatives are there to wail at the burial. The dead are laid in the public sepulcher in the most beautiful suburb of the city, in which those who fall in war are always buried; with the exception of those slain at Marathon, who for their singular and extraordinary valor were interred on the spot where they fell. After the bodies have been laid in the earth, a man chosen by the state…pronounces over them an appropriate panegyric…Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was chosen to pronounce their eulogium."
Apparently, the Greeks had less trepidation about seeing the bones of their slain warriors than we do today; it would be hard to imagine the bones of unidentified Soldier Dead "laid out in a tent" for all to honor. Of course, the Greeks did what their technology allowed them to do; our level of advancement provides us with different choices.
The public is called to honor the fallen. Theodore Roosevelt, in a 1907 Arlington National Cemetery dedication to the dead of his regiment, said "a few had the 'supreme good fortune of dying honorably on a well-fought field for their country's flag.'" During World War I and World War II, two of Roosevelt's own sons had this "good fortune" and another, Kermit, killed himself while stationed at a military base. Ultimately, the final resting place for fallen military is but a marker of our debt to them and their families. No ceremony can do much to assuage the loss borne by the living.
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"But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our power to add or detract."
Abraham Lincoln's words are as meaningful now as they were when spoken in the Gettysburg Address. There is no "fixing" the bereaved of someone killed in service. There is only the offering of some form of recognition of their sacrifice, as reflected in the words of Pericles speaking to those who gathered at a public funeral for Peloponnesian dead: "Comfort, therefore, not condolence, is what I have to offer to the parents of the dead who may be here."
I have toured several great military cemeteries - Arlington National Cemetery, of course, but also Verdun, Punchbowl in Hawaii, Normandy, and the U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Some of these locations are frequently visited, some are more solitary, and each has its own special spirit.
At Arlington, the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns silences the crowds. I looked at the faces of the people watching the solemn ritual and tried to fathom what they were thinking, what they knew about what they were seeing. I alternated between wanting to gather them around and tell them a story, much as a worn and weathered traveler would share his experiences with his friends during a slow evening by a warm fire, and, on the other hand, wanting to get a megaphone and bellow out that what they were witnessing was not even the beginning of the beginning of a story. I wandered up and down the hills and through the lanes where few others ventured, and even those who did usually rode the tour shuttle. Arlington is a wonderful cemetery, but my real sense of the dead came more strongly to me at other burial grounds.
At the Punchbowl in Honolulu, doves filled the hollowed-out basin with a diminutive and plaintive cry. A single bird might not be noticed, but the sounds of hundreds joined together in an unorchestrated chorus that formed a soundtrack for the visual beauty of the cemetery. I came across an elderly man with a small electric grass cutter in his hand; he was kneeling by a grave and slowly, carefully trimming the already well-tended grass around a grave. I wanted to ask him who was buried there, but left him alone with his thoughts and memories.
The U.S. Soldiers' and Airmen's Home National Cemetery is like an old veteran: he doesn't stand as straight as he used to, but he still stands tall under the spreading branches of the trees that shade the graves.
The Verdun cemetery is located in rolling farmland that also houses French, German, and English cemeteries. The words from the song, "where have all the soldiers gone?," seem to float through the hills and valleys, wrapping its themes and lines around the multitudinous rows of crosses. There are so many dead soldiers. When I tried to contemplate the grief of the family members, I found myself incapable of doing so, stymied, as though I were trying to understand the theory of relativity. I walked among the hoar-covered marble tombstones and found myself viewing the cemetery as a single unit instead of as individual graves, much like single soldiers are lost in a division of troops standing in formation.
