10 September 2009
 
Secrets

(Edward Moore Kennedy Grave, Arlington, VA)
 
I am going to get to the end of this presently- and of course, the end is only the beginning, when we transition from the black-and-white and musty papers to the Technicolor that masquerades as life.
 
Life is the stuff that gets in the way of what we meant to do when we got up this morning. The Hubrismobile is a month or two out of currency for Virginia’s annual safety inspection- I have been distracted and a little short of cash. The Bluesmobile is getting close to expiring, too, and without swift and dramatic action, I would suddenly go from two fine cars to none.
 
So, off to wait in front of the dealer of fine German machines this morning.
 
I took the week-old NewsWeek with me. I have dropped the subscription- who has time to read anymore?- but a few issues have continued to dribble in. There was a canonization of Teddy Kennedy in progress last week, and that was all over the pages I read.
 
There was nothing in the pages about his sending an emissary to Yuri Andropov, almost the last of the old Kremlin Commie bosses offering to help out the Soviet Union in the confrontation with Ronald Reagan. That was revealed long ago, when the archives of the KBG were briefly opened. The Senator and his staff, along with the media, ignored the formerly-secret Soviet memorandum.
 
From another source, this one the disaffected former KGB archivist Major Vasili Mitrokhin, came a string of reports in the KBG records about the first contact between the late Senator and the Russians, these offering to work for legislation that would undermine Saint Jimmy, the President from Georgia, and his hawkish NSC advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
 
There is no reason for either source to have lied about what was going on, and there was no denial from the Senator when the reports surfaced during his life. He just sailed on, the great Liberal Lion, serene in his legacy, which made him bigger than his government, and larger than his elected President.
 
I could not help but think of that as the news floated out of the radio while I was waiting. President Obama is my President and Commander in Chief. According to the terms of my service, I can be recalled to active duty for a period of ten years past the end of my active service.
 
Not that they would, of course. That would be a ridiculous waste of the taxpayer's money, though wonders about that these days. But the fact remains that if the President asked, I would appear. That is obligation, regardless of what I think about the politics of the moment.
 
I am still a sworn officer of the United States of America, and if I had opened up an independent dialogue with a foreign power then or now, I could rightly be accused of abrogating my oath to defend the Constitution. I don’t know what the consequences of such folly might be, but it certainly would not have ended with a fine burial plot in Arlington when it was all done.
 
In fact, anyone who did such a thing in wartime might have wound up where the Nazi saboteurs did: in the very saddest and most remote part of the District of Columbia, where only the poor and nameless were put to rest.
 
I told you this was going somewhere, and I was determined not to get off on the President’s powerful address to the joint session of Congress last night. That man can speak, I’ll tell you. When it was done, I was bolstered by the assurance that his health care plan won’t cost us a dime, will not threaten senior citizens, will not result in rationing of services, and will not include anything for illegal immigrants.
 
That is quite a relief, as you probably feel too. I checked the notes, though, and I could not find the number of the Bill actually being considered in Congress- there are five of them, right?-  that had those provisions in it. There was nothing about how the undocumented people were going to be escorted out of the nation's ERs, either, which are obligated to serve those in need regardless of means.
 
I looked, but I can’t find anyone who can explain how that is going to happen.
 
My President said he would veto any legislation that came to him that was not in accord with his plan, so I guess it is going to be OK.
 
Anyhow, the nice people at the German dealership- they call it The American Service Center, to ensure that no one gets confused- inducted the Hubrismobile with assurances they would take good care of me and it probably wouldn’t cost much.
 
I believed them, since I was in that sort of mood this morning, and walked home with my travel-mug of tepid coffee.
 
The Hispanic men in their hauling dump trucks were hauling away the last of the debris from the latest of the Buckingham garden apartments to be leveled. Trees were down, and things that once had been neatly stacked and cemented were strewn in wild disarray. The block looks a lot like the scene at Blue Plains where I stood earlier this week, in the rain.
 
I found the place where the Army truck took the bodies of the executed Germans was documented in a Secret memo to the President, which actually only went to the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Secretary of War, and was filed away in the classified archives of the Adjutant General.
 
The truck pulled up to the DC Home of the Aged and Infirm, passed through the gates, and proceeded to the back of the property, almost to the District line. Six graves had been prepared, and there was an armed guard to provide privacy. Six stakes had been pounded into ground at the head of each one, placed outside the perimeter fence that guarded the remains of the indigent. The Germans would be excluded from that, the first row outside the fence. A brief interdenominational service was provided at 7:30 PM by Lt. Col. Texler (Protestant) and 1 Lt. McTague (Catholic).

Extensive precautions were taken to ensure there were no pictures and no names, only the numbers on the stakes.
 
After that, the graves were filled and the truck and the guards departed the grounds of the Home. And drove slowly back to motor pool at Walter Reed.
 
The last time the saboteurs were in the news was in The Post, in October of that year. Someone spilled the beans, since secrets are notoriously hard to keep, even the ones about which few care. Reporter Linton Burkett and a staff photographer snuck down to Potter’s Field and took a picture of the stakes in the ground outside the fence.
 
Then, over the course of the next three awful years, more than eighty-thousand American kids died in the next three years of the struggle, and as many as 20 or forty million Germans and Russians.
 
Since we have the once-secret memo now, it is possible to break the code:
 
276 Richard Quirin
277 Heinrich Heinck
278 Herbie Haupt
279 Edward Quirin
280 Hermann Nuebauer
281 Werner Thiel
 
That is the last we hear about any of these men for a while- at least until the other Nazis showed up, and the cemetery was lost, and another war resurrected the name of #276 in the cause of trying other bad men.
 

Well, not quite the last. We will address the matter of the modern-day Nazis and the Intrepid Nazi Hunters tomorrow.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com