Reflections on an American Military Cemetery

In early summer of 1994 my wife and I visited northern Italy with a tour group, comprised almost entirely of contemporaries. On a side-trip outside Florence, we visited an American cemetery in which are buried U. S. servicemen who died in World War II. By coincidence, this was during the D-Day ceremonies.

Because we had lived through that war, the hour spent here touched us all deeply. Upwards of 4,000 were buried here. They were the 31% of bodies which had not been sent for by relatives and brought home after the war.

There stood the crosses and stars of David, rank upon rank, in formation, just as the bodies beneath them had no doubt often lined up in formation, standing at attention as erect as these monuments now are. It was late in the day, and the long shadows cast by each cross and star made it easy to imagine that the shadow of those lives, given for their country then, were being cast across our lives today as a reminder that we must resist the squandering of the legacy those lives bought for us.

I reminded myself that I had had 50 years they never got. These young men, once my contemporaries, would now be forever nineteen… or twenty-two… or eighteen.

Two of our group came back to report that they found ten graves from Louisiana in the first three rows. I have no idea what that meant in context, but it had an impact on us. My wife and I wept.

I reflected that this was the last war our country fought with a will to win. I thanked God that as a father of daughters I had never had to send them to war under irresolute political leaders, or incompetent military ones.

Then I thought about the sickening decline of the country these boys had died for — how our freedoms have been stolen from us by a government which has become so devoid of principle that it often can't even recognize the venality of its own behavior. And through the decades the Congress has built a huge bureaucracy, now intruding itself daily into our lives, which it either cannot or will not control. And created a huge debt, a legacy to our children, which it cannot or will not control.

The only answer to this corruption of our political process is restoration of government to its rightful owners — the people. And that requires congressional term limits.

The drive back to Florence was a sober one. There is a second American cemetery in Italy. It is outside Rome. Ironically, we learned the next day that President Clinton had visited that other cemetery at the same time we had visited "ours." I was glad we had had the Florence cemetery to ourselves. The incident is engraved on my memory.

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