28 May 2007
Foreign Fields
I had to move several rungs down Dr. Mazlow's hierarchy of needs last night, but we have been down that road before, and I will not bore you with the details. The lack of power did not trouble the endless party across the street, and besides, power or not, it had been a nice day. I had lounged at poolside, chatting with Big Pink's aquatic in-crowd. Ms Hamilton, the tanning champ was there, as was Marty II and her current paramour, FedEx John.
Kristy the pert little South African is re-reading Harry Potter in sequence, preparing for the release of the last book this July.
I could feel my skin beginning to tingle from the sun and departed to take a nap. I rose before dinner to make the ritual weekly calls when I noticed the open door to the balcony was beginning shudder in a rising breeze, and the leaves had commenced to dance on the trees that now rise to the fourth floor.
A spring storm nearly ripped the door off the hinges last year, so I lunged to close the door just as the thunderhead delivered a body blow to the building. I could feel the impact on the windows and branches swing wildly toward the windows. The power flickered, came back on, died, returned and died again as a bolt of lightning shot down on Big Pink's eight story crown with a boom like artillery.
Rain pelted the windows with urgency, turning the glass opaque.
The temperature went up with the passing of the front, and a clammy dusk ensued, dinner quietly rotting on the counter in the darkened kitchen.
I lit candles- more heat and little light- and tried to find news of the estimate for restoration of services, but to no avail. The Public Radio Station was playing The Big Broadcast show of classic radio drama, so to the scratchy sound of Dragnet episode #120 I found myself falling decades through time.
Sweating in the chair, flicking through half-forgotten tunes, I thought this is the faintest taste of everyday life in Iraq, only cooler and without IEDs.
In a darkened reverie, I drifted through my walk in Arlington. The neatly groomed lawns contrasted so starkly with others I have seen. I contemplated the Raj cemetery in the Civil Lines District of old Delhi, which is sad place. The Indians did not desecrate the grounds, as howling mobs might have in 1948 when the Viceroy departed. Instead, they considered it worthy of benign neglect.
Maintenance is not funded by Her Majesty's Government, but rather by the dwindling family base of those whose kin died out on assignment, and whose bones are joining the ancient soil. I wandered quite dumbstruck there among the subalterns and their spouses, the children, and the imposing slab of Brigadier Nicholson, hero of the Relief of Delhi and later Nicholson Sahib, venerated by his own martial Sikh cult.
While some remembered, anyway.
I wanted to look at the full list of American Military cemeteries overseas, since I know there are dozens of them, but there was no power and no connectivity.
They are located places that are now more exotic than they used to be when we swaggered in the days of the full-blown colonial system. Manila and Panama come to mind, meticulously groomed, I would hope, to the same standards as The Punchbowl in Honolulu.
The cemeteries overseas are run by the American Battlefield Monuments Commission, which dates to the end of the First World War. The first chairman was Gen. John J. "Blackjack" Pershing, who maintained an office in the Old Executive Office Building after he retired from active service for the rest of his life. Speaking of his dead, he said 'Time will not dim the glory of their deeds," denying the process of both entropy and empire.
AMBC's mission is focused on the dead of the World Wars, though it also maintains a cemetery in Mexico City from the Mexican-American War and a cemetery at Corozal, in what used to be the US Canal Zone in Panama. That includes many U.S. troops and civilians who died of yellow fever while building the Panama Canal.
The numbers are significant. There are 124,917 American war dead interred in ABMC cemeteries: 30,921 from World War I, 93,246 from World War II, and 750 from the Mexican-American War, which concluded in 1848.
The age of the great cemeteries overseas is ended. Families of those killed during World Wars were offered the option of repatriation after each conflict was ended. A friend wrote me this week to say that an Uncle who was killed at St. Lo came home in 1949. Most of the families opted for the same thing, although nearly 40% elected to let the lost rest near the places they fell.
I know the AMBC tries to do a good job, but as the memory of the wars fade there will be increasing pressure on the budget. I suspect inevitably the level of care will go the way of the resting place for Rome's legions.
I do know this: the most neglected national cemeteries are the ones that lie north of the 38th Parallel and the Demilitarized Zone in Korea.
I was in Pyongyang a few years ago, when that was still something of a novelty. I was escorting an official ostensibly on a mission to discuss the Missing of the conflict there. Nearly 8,000 Americans did not come home, and this is not the same as the situation in Vietnam, where the search was the beginning of the long process that restored mostly cordial relations with the former adversary.
The North Koreans do not care, and one of their gruff generals said as much, bluntly, before moving on to other items on their agenda. They do consider the matter of the missing a means of acquiring hard currency, which is a straight up money-for-bones proposition.
It is not that difficult. The thing about Korea is that many of the missing are just where we put them to rest. The Army and Marines occupied North Korea, right to the Yalu River, in places, before the Chinese entered the war to defend Kim Il Song's communist regime.
As they swept south, they overran the temporary resting places that had been consecrated and cataloged by the personnel of the Army Graves Registration system. Under fierce pressure and with great courage, the United Nations forces withdrew in haste to geography that could be held against the onslaught. In the west, Seoul fell, again.
In the east, X Corps was pushed to Hungnam and besieged. The evacuation of its personnel and equipment by sea at Wonson is one of those forgotten moments of history that was as significant as the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk in 1940, though at the end there was no victory. Only stalemate.
All the other temporary cemeteries in the area of withdrawal fell under communist control, including the cemetery at Hungnam, located in the outskirts of that city. A second cemetery had to be established near the beach as the escape was in progress. This cemetery was designated "Hungnam United Nations Military Cemetery No. 2," and abandoned with minimal ceremony on Christmas Eve, 1950.
The withdrawal of the Eighth Army to positions south of the 38th parallel also resulted in the loss of control of the cemeteries at Pyongyang and Suchon.
Although we were offered a tour of the Great Leader's birth home near Pyongyang when we were there, a parallel offer to visit the American and UN dead was not provided.
To the soldiers who rest in those graves I offer a tribute today. May they rest in the peace that eludes the rest of us.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com