Untitled Document

30 May 2004

Known But to God

It is seasonably cool in Washington and promises to be an excellent day at Big Pink. The Pool is open. It glows aqua in the dawn's early light, the underwater lights bravely shining through the night. The first big motorcycles of this Memorial Day's Rolling Thunder are roaring down Arlington Boulevard toward the Mall.

I was first in the pool this season, standing and waiting outside the link fence until 10:00 sharp yesterday. For me, the First Swim is as much a vital moment in the official commencement of summer as the visit to Arlington, and the decoration of the graves of those I knew.

The World War II monument was dedicated yesterday to great fanfare. My younger boy was there, working the set-up for the vast crowd that came to hear the remarks of three Presidents.

No one here was quite happy with the design of the monument, which sits at the east end of the Reflecting Pool, where we used to jog from the Pentagon. It is in the middle of the maze of gigantic temporary buildings of Main Navy and War had been erected during the conflict to house the legions of wartime government workers. There were even a couple of footbridges over the Pool for the convenience of the War Effort.

Those building are gone now, with them the fading memory of sacrifice. The design they selected to memorialize those who served was criticized as being either too vast or too unimaginative.

Opponents fought it tooth and nail over location, design and construction. But now, like the Vietnam Memorial, here it is. The veterans and those who love them seem content with it.

They throng the streets of the capital on this long weekend, jammed with symbolic anniversaries.

There is the great race out west that has been held on this day for nearly a century. In 1911, ace driver Ray Harroun won the first long-distance auto race at Indianapolis in a Marmon automobile, a pretty hot piece of machinery in its time. I don't know if he was a veteran or not. He would have to have served in the Spanish war in 1898, and I think he was too young. The course was paved with bricks.

In 1922, the Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in Washington, D.C., by former President and Chief Justice William Howard Taft.

In 1958, the Unknown Dead from the police action in Korea and World War Two were interred alongside their comrade from the War to End Wars at the national Cemetery at Arlington. President Eisenhower presided on that one, pinning the Congressional Medal of Honor on little velvet pads perched atop the two caskets. The citation to the nation's highest military award for heroism is of necessity a brief one, since the occupants of the Tomb are known but to God.

Indianapolis will have its 500 mile race today, but the prestige is tarnished by conflicts between rapacious owners of competing professional racing circuits.

It is not the same race that came with such excitement, when my Father would establish a command post on the patio, armed with graph paper and stop watches and a big Philco radio to get all the lap times and chart the positions of the contenders.

Dad even took me to the race in 1962, to watch Roger Ward win his second 500 in a Watson-prepared, Offenhauser-powered machine. After it was over, I was permitted to go on the track and retrieve some of the butcher paper signs his pit crew held up as he flashed by.

I doubt if there is anyone doing that today. Even at the track the data will be pecked into a computer. Dad's charts and graphs are as quaint now as scoring a baseball game by hand, listening to the radio. A single row of bricks remains on the high-speed asphalt to indicate the start and finish lines.

And I once knew all the names of the winners at the Brickyard. But I will wager you straight up that you cannot name any of the winners since someone with the improbable name of Arie Luyendyk took the cup in 1997.

Mr. Lincoln still looks down from his marble chair inside the great granite rectangle, his eyes shadowed in contemplation. His statue has seen much since Mr. Taft dedicated the place, and now he looks down his reflecting pool to the squat obelisks of the World War Two Monument.

The crowd that Dr. King addressed from Mr. Lincoln's steps stretched that far.

At Arlington, the Old Guard marches the measured step at the Tomb on the hill, where Bobby Lee had his home until the Yankee began to bury their dead in his garden. The three Unkowns still sleep beside the Guard's measured tread, though the great sarcophagus honoring the First War's Unknown has shown some cracks and must be repaired with marble quarried from the same pit as the original.

It was on Memorial Day, 1921, that four unknowns were exhumed from four World War I American cemeteries in France. Later that year, Sgt. Edward Younger, Purple Heart recipient and holder of the Distinguished Service Medal for valor selected the Unknown from four identical caskets at Chalons-sur-Marne. The caskets had been shuffled like a deck of cards to ensure that there was no pre-selection.

Sgt. Younger selected the Unknown by placing a spray of white roses on the third casket from his left.

He said later he just had a feeling about it.

The chosen casket was transported to the United States aboard the USS Olympia. Those remaining were interred in the Meuse Argonne Cemetery, France.

There were four Unknowns for a while. They added one with great solemnity on Memorial Day, May 28, 1984. President Reagan presided over the presentation of the Medal of Honor to the Vietnam Unknown.

But time and progress have marched on. In our considerable effort to bring home all our dead from the lost war in Southeast Asia, enormous strides have been made the identification of remains. Dedicated professionals began to work down through the list of the Missing, with sometimes grudging cooperation from the host nation, who still have a million of their own to account for. Sometimes investigators succeeded in naming the dead with the smallest bits of evidence, bringing closure to the families.

There were low discussions in the background that suggested there was no need for anyone to remain known but to God. There are still over 78,000 missing from World War Two, nearly a half again more than all the lost in SE Asia. Over 6,000 are still lost in Korea.

But that no longer had to be the case for the missing of Southeast Asia. Accordingly, the Vietnam Unknown was exhumed on May 14, 1998, for additional testing.

Based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, DoD scientists identified the Unknown as Air Force 1st Lt. Michael Joseph Blassie, shot down near An Loc, Vietnam, in 1972. He was returned to his family with full military honors.

Senior DoD officials have decided that the crypt of the Vietnam Unknown will remain vacant, pending some unexpected development.

In an act that some might find a bit callous, though perfectly justified, the Department took back Lieutenant Blassie's Congressional Medal.

You see, they said, it wasn't really for him.

It was intended for the lost, out there alone in the night.