Immaculate Gardens

These are the sights seen, sounds heard and thoughts racing through my mind on September 15, 2001 - on a special trip to Gettysburg.   On this Memorial Day, pause from your picnic or ballgame and take time to remember those who gave everything they had for strangers.

From Route 15 to Gettysburg, A Journey:

"The sun, far past the meridian and dipping now towards the southwestern horizon, cast brightly in the passenger side windows as we motored through Dillsburg.   It followed us the rest of the way down to Gettysburg and as we passed through town and out to the park to Cemetery Ridge. There we stopped at a familiar place; the High Water Mark.  Perhaps, it was the very parking slot at which I had stopped some twenty-seven years earlier on my way to the start of my Marine Corps career.  It was later in the day this time.  Much past the time and far cooler than when I had diverted to Gettysburg on that long ago, steamy June day.

Then, I had listened to a guide tell a tired and sweating group about Longstreet’s attack and how his obedient soldiers had failed to get past where we stood now.  Knowing then only what I had read about war, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes.  Now, I knew a bit more.  I felt their despair.  More than a quarter century later, I had gained a new perspective of battle from what my own eyes had seen.  My sense of what the men in blue and gray had gone through was sharpened by personal experiences.  I was able to better appreciate what it took to overcome the crushing anxiety that took hold inside these unlucky men.

We moved from the park road and over to sit on a flat stone.  Its smooth surface stuck up from the dry grass and bare patches of dirt in front of the Copse of Trees.  It was quiet there.  Most of the wayfarers milling about the High Water Mark had let the dropping sun chase them back into town.  The sun was gone now.  The western sky over South Mountain glowed orange for a time and then settled back to a dusky blue.  Transcontinental flights, allowed back in the sky after the government had grounded the fleet in the wake of the attacks, traced east-west contrails high above.  The powder white lines grabbed and reflected the rays of the disappearing sun.  The Confederate states’ monuments on distant Seminary Ridge disappeared in the darkening shadows.

We talked not about the battle of Gettysburg but about what had happened that week.  Another war, this one like no other before it, had begun.   Once again, Americans would fight.  We did not know it then but this war would continue longer than all the others fought by Americans before.  It would take place in far away tribal Anbar Province, high on a frigid, dry ridgeline in the Hindu Kush or in clandestine operations centers hidden deep within the national bureaucracy.  This was to be my unborn son’s war and the war of the children he will later bear.  It will remain subdued at times and flare up at others, kindling new fears and familiar outrage.  It will take no predictable shape or form.  There will be no waves of flag carrying zealots in neat rows marching across fields.  No mounted horseman or cannons set hub-to-hub.  The laws of armed combat will be difficult to apply. This will be a war of the night, of stealth; a calculated chess game pitting coldly efficient technology against primitive hate.  This is to be a fight for the mind first and only, secondarily, brute force against a body.  At its conclusion, whenever that far off day may be, there will be no high water mark, no stone monument to a valiant leader, no post-war tourist havens lined with shops catering to the curious; shelves overflowing with cheap remembrances.  The only similarities to wars of our past would be the hate and the killing.

The guns will eventually be silent.  They always grow quiet when humans become exhausted and sickened by what they have done.  Millions of eyes will strain to the future to see that end.  Will it ever come?  Someday.  Until then the war goes on.  The dead are offered trite and soon forgotten remembrances in hometown newspapers.  The pictures of the innocent faces are broadcast; flashing by on a computer or flat screen accompanied by silent platitudes.  No words can, or ever will, assuage the pain.  The only comfort the families of the dead have for now is to take the painfully familiar exit from the dismal and afflicted road they travel and arrive at a hushed and unwelcoming respite.  A lamentable sanctuary.  A quiet place where white rectangles are arrayed, side-by-side, nearly touching, in the fresh loam and immaculate gardens of graveyards."