When the Traces of Military Sacrifice Are Erased

By Edward Skloot | February 15, 2007

When I read Billy Shore's op-ed about his visit to Arlington National Cemetery, I realized I've been waiting to see a reflection like his for several years. The White House and Pentagon have done so much to make the final stage of military sacrifice invisible, so every experience is individualized and isolated - like Billy's personal excursion to Arlington.

In its own way, the policy is a variation of that old issue in philanthropy: Why focus on soup kitchens when the real question is why we need to have soup kitchens in the first place? Once you start to take up that larger issue seriously you shift the mental model of philanthropy. It goes from charity to problem solving, and from problem solving to policy making. You move upstream from downstream. You make causal linkages that never occurred before. You see Arlington from 15,000 feet as well as seeing it from between two gravestones. Both sights are urgent to absorb.

I've also been waiting to see GIS maps of Arlington at a six-month pace starting from, say, four years ago. The pictures would track a narrative, not a story. They would provide a collective visual experience, not a fragment seen out of the corner of the eye as you drive over the bridge to Washington, DC. In this Age of the Visual the government has deliberately created a blind spot. Blind spots can cause grave accidents.

Every Friday night, in the synagogue I attend, the rabbi reads the names of several fallen soldiers, their ages and the towns they came from. They are incorporated into the Sabbath service. Then the names of recently deceased congregants are spoken. Then, all the members who died that week are noted, going back to when the synagogue was established, more than 100 years ago. Periodically, names are read of people I have known, a few quite well.

But nothing hits me as hard as hearing the name of a soldier, maybe one-third my age, that I don’t know and would never have met. Regardless of how I feel about our military missions abroad, a wash of futility and feelings of depletion and sadness roll over me. I don't fully understand this reaction, but it feels like someone just dog-eared a page in a great, sad American war novel, only to open it again, and continue again, a week later.

Surely we read these names to recognize the preciousness of life and to hold them, if only for a moment, in memory. It's memory, and memory alone, that helps us avoid the worst choices, the most desperate thoughts, the most appalling behavior. What do we do when governments, and a compliant media, erase as many traces of the memory as possible? One small answer is to visit Arlington and to remember Lance Corporal Geoffrey Cayer's name, and read it aloud, even when no one is listening.

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Related:

Letter from an airplane bearing the remains of a young marine by Bill Shore, The New York Times, August 4, 2006