Arlington And The Price Of Freedom

The cold gray twilight glows pink at the horizon. Robert E. Lee’s mansion looms on the brow of the hill. Perfect rows of white tombstones gleam in the final gasps of daylight and the call of a night bird breaks the silence.

Wrapped in dark woolens, shoulders slightly hunched against the cold, visitors walk the narrow paved road toward the Kennedy plot.



Three brothers whose lives have profoundly changed the landscape of the American heart rest against the hill.

My friend Bill and I walk down the steps that bisect the final resting place of many, descending to the tomb of the unknown.



Pine wreaths with simple scarlet bows have been carefully laid at the head of each.

No one talks. Each person is in the solitary confines of his thoughts. The breeze whispers through the bare trees, a rush of December air across the lonely landscape.

Iwo Jima was one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific theatre in World War Two. Eight hundred American lives lost for every mile. A foothold in the Pacific from which to defeat the Japanese.

One of the ‘walking dead’, my friend’s father.

He lived beyond the terror of Iwo Jima; his body host to more shrapnel than the medicine of the day was able to remove. He died on July 4^th 1959. A piece of that shrapnel broke free and shattered the walls of his heart. He died six months before his son---my friend, Bill—was born.

The final legacy of a soldier, Bill has led an amazing life in spite of the absence of a father. Son of just one of that war’s heroes, he walked through the solitude of the graves. Only he may know the contents of his thoughts, but from the heart of one who looked on as the guard marched his lonely vigil at the tomb of the unknown, I have nothing but gratitude to convey for these men and women whose lives were cut in twain in their youth to uphold an ideal.

Freedom.

The most expensive of ideals.

My father served in the same Pacific theater in WWII. He also carried the shrapnel of a battle—an air battle-- throughout his life. He passed March of this year, the victim of the cruelest of neurological diseases—Parkinson’s. Not the walking dead, he lived his life out. A member of ‘the greatest generation’ he was the recipient of many humanitarian awards and kudos in his business life. First to fly over Hiroshima after the bomb—photographing what not even he knew what-- first to take his plane into the eye of a typhoon, my father lived a life of firsts. He had the gift of words that inspired many to their higher self.

How much might Bill’s father have done had the legacy of war not taken him from his family too soon? How much have we lost with each life in pursuit of a stable world in our own times?

Silent Night.

Rest easy, sleep well my brothers, fathers, sons, sisters, mothers and daughters.

Know the line has held, your job is done.

Rest easy, sleep well.

Others have taken up where you fell, the line has held.

Peace, peace, and farewell...