I remember distinctly when I took the picture above. As the state’s “Off the Beaten Path” reporter, I was on assignment for Visit Florida when I headed over to Bushnell where the Florida National Cemetery is located. On a tour of the grounds with the cemetery’s director, in the distance I saw this man working alone, positioning each tombstone with the greatest care and precision as he used a variety of tools to ensure each marker was level and in line. With countless headstones and countless rows to maintain, it seemed to me to be an overwhelming task, but there he was in the hot sun working tirelessly, unconcerned with anyone or anything else around him.
I wrote a story about it which you can read here: bit.ly/…
...and maybe that’ll give you a sense of what I felt that day. Now whenever Memorial Day comes around, I think of this man and what he was doing in order to honor the people here. He was working for the person on that marker and to make sure that anyone arriving to pay their respects would see that their loved one was being cared for.
I never served, which finds me filled with questions when I meet veterans. Those questions are most often asked when I lead students on tours in Washington and we visit Arlington and the Vietnam Wall and the WW II Memorial. I tell the veterans I meet that I don’t think I’d have had the courage to do what they had done, and invariably they’ll try to pacify me by saying they’re sure I would’ve had I been in their place, but I just don’t know. I’m just grateful they did what they felt honor-bound to do, I’m grateful they came back, I’m sorry many didn’t, and I’m doubly sorry when their loss was predicated by the result of political forces and posturing. To truly honor the fractional percentage of Americans who choose to serve, it is the shared duty of the rest of us to treat these men and women as people, and not pawns.
One last thing. I’ve traveled across America quite a bit when working on my books. After researching what happened on Christmas night in 1776 when George Washington and 2,400 men crossed the Delaware to defeat the Hessians at Trenton, I was riding back to New Hope, Pennsylvania, when I spotted a small park along the riverfront. A row of headstones caught my attention. On each was engraved the words ‘Unknown Soldier. Continental Line’. If not for these anonymous citizen soldiers who were fighting for what even Washington had considered a “lost cause,” there’s a chance America would not exist. I think of these men, too, and I think of them often. If you can, stop by this park and pay your respects.