On Hallowed Ground - Poole

 

Millions of people come to Arlington Cemetery every year, some come as visitors and take the standard tour, some come to mourn and seek the grave of a loved one, and many come solemnly as a part of multiple daily funeral processions.  Having done all three and having had the opportunity to drive by and around the National Cemetery on a daily commute for almost two decades I still found it to be a mysterious and, if given into, a mentally overwhelming place.  “On Hallowed Ground, the Story of Arlington National Cemetery, by Robert Poole, takes out the mystery.  But his work only pushes the mentally overwhelming nature of Arlington, and what it stands for, to new heights.

I received this book as Christmas gift this year from a disabled Iraqi vet making a new life for himself along the Space Coast with me here in Florida.  We have become friends.  In honesty my initial reaction to the gift, was of course gracious, but as I thought about the pile of unread books seeking priority, my gut told me, having lived in Northern Virginia most of my life, what more stories about the old cemetery did I need to hear?  Well, for whatever reasons, I cracked the cover.  Ironically on a flight from Orlando to Regan National I read about the history of the land once belonging to Robert E. Lee as my flight covered the whole of the Confederacy in just less than two hours.  I was hooked on the story.  I assume Mr. Poole chose the word “story” as opposed to history, because the history of the cemetery is more appropriately contained within the lives of the thousands upon thousands of individuals now resting eternally.

But it is indeed a  history of the Cemetery itself, which was mired in controversy from its beginnings, belonging to the Lee family and acquired from the government in questionable fashion during the Civil War, a wrong that was later set right and continuing on to present day when the US Army finally realized in January 2009 that the practice of recognizing officers buried in the cemetery with more honors then those of enlisted men who were killed in combat was a latent form of elitism and class discrimination. This has also now been corrected.   Along the way he discusses the evolution of the cemetery during each of our Nations conflicts including the War of 1812, WWI and WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and our current clashes in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Conspicuously missing from his history is Desert Storm.  

The mystery of the cemetery, its size, its look, how it operates, and the meaning of many of its icons have now been explained.  What is also clear is that even the most somber and noble of our Nation’s practice’s to do what is right, when it comes to the Government; one can never escape the politics of a situation.  With two sides to every argument and each side vying to use whatever influence they have to push their agenda.   Nothing stands as a clearer indicator of this political maneuvering than the ill advised burial of the “Unknown” from the Vietnam conflict.  Who was in fact known but whose burial was insisted upon to close an ugly page in our Nation’s history.  That episode has ironically demonstrated a decade after a war plagued with lies and cover-ups, that the highest echelons of our government were still not immune from a good one.

With a rich history of meaning, I will never walk the fields of Arlington with the same mystery of how they came to be.  I will still be awed and overwhelmed by the sacrifice they represent.