Two gravesites in Arlington

May 31, 2004

There are two old gravesites among the thousands in Arlington National Cemetery that have particular meaning for me on Memorial Day.

The first is that of my grandfather, who I never knew. He served the nation in World War II and Korea. But his body does not actually rest in the cemetery; it is far beneath the waves of the Atlantic Ocean. He sacrificed his life for the space race in 1964 when his plane exploded over the Atlantic while he and 23 other Air Force men worked on a test for the Gemini project.

Of him, the Greek orator Pericles might have said, as he told the Athenians following the Battle of Marathon, “Famous men have the whole earth as their memorial: it is not only the inscriptions on their graves in their own country that mark them out; no, in foreign lands also, not in any visible form but in people’s hearts, their memory abides and grows. It is for you to try to be like them.”

It is for me to be like my grandfather, whose greatest lesson to me comes not from any acquaintance I had with him, but from that which I had not.

Likewise of my great uncle, whose grave is not far from my grandfather’s marker. He was the legendary Ross Greening, who flew a plane in the Doolittle Raid over Japan at the beginning of World War II, piloted 26 missions over Italy before being shot down, hid in Italy for most of a year, and spent a two years as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany.

In 1943, in a village courtyard in Italy, my uncle Ross buried his diary and a letter to his family. When it was unearthed years later, the diary said that if he was killed before the war was over, his service would not have been in vain. He wrote, “I hope there are others who can benefit from our experiences by our word for it. I hope the whole United States will be better for it all.”

Well, the United States is better for it all. And the world is better for it all, too.

My uncle fought against Japanese imperialism, Italian fascism and German Nazism. Yet today, our former enemies are major world powers with free people. The power of freedom is not just limited to the borders of our own country. It is the basic universal need of simple humanity.

Across the world in Italy, people made sacrifices for my uncle, because his identity as an American was synonymous with the blessing of freedom that they longed for. After the war was over, my uncle made his way back to Italy. He discovered that during his two years in a prisoner of war camp, the enemy had killed many of the people who hid and protected him during his months in the mountains and villages. Many of them had known they would need to make this sacrifice as they fed, clothed and sheltered an American, but they did it because they felt a compelling love for freedom.

The love of freedom is often stronger for those who don’t have it than those who do. There are slaves in Sudan, oppressed men and women in North Korea, silenced Christians in the Islamic world yearning for freedom. Meanwhile, millions of Americans on the comfort of college and university campuses, in their palatial homes, or in their city streets paved with gold will hardly pause on Memorial Day to remember patriotic things.

This younger generation has few patriots in the highest sense, and those we have populate the battlements of Iraq. It is to the majority of young Americans – those who have forgotten freedom – that I recount a letter my uncle wrote to fellow POWs as commander of his quarter of Stalag Luft I. When the American prisoners of war were becoming discouraged and restless, these words of my uncle were read aloud in camp:

Now is a good time to take a reading on yourself. If you’re not getting on now, you’ll be worse later as there is no doubt times will get tougher. What is happening to us in this process of separating the men from the boys? I am sure we will find mostly men if we keep reminding ourselves what we are working for.

Now is the time to take a reading on America. If we value anything more than freedom, we will lose our freedom. And as my uncle would say, the key to staying on freedom’s course is to just keep on reminding ourselves what we are working for.