Beyond the Graves

Looking down from Arlington Cemetery, what would the veterans of America’s wars see?

Nov 14, 2025

“. . . And we note our place with bookmarkers

“That measure what we’ve lost . . . .”

The Dangling Conversation, written by Paul Simon, Simon and Garfunkel, 1966

The white marble headstones in Arlington National Cemetery in the hills overlooking Washington measure far more than lives honored, risked, ruined and lost.

Looking out from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier across the Potomac to the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument to the hollowed halls of Congress an even greater loss appears. Dollars, hubris and cupidity are overtaking duty, honor and country.

In these hills lie the remains of warriors and others who risked and gave their lives and health to reunite a nation torn asunder by slavery. Now politicians in both major parties and their acolytes are tearing it apart again in shameless quests for political power, online clicks and campaign contributions.

So what lessons might a visit to Arlington teach?

The current successor to Honest Abe Lincoln, whose memorial lies just across the river, has given white South Africans preferential treatment for immigration. What might Arlington’s Union veterans of Shiloh and Antietam and Gettysburg make of that?

What would Maj. Gen. George Crook in Section 2, Grave 974 or Maj. Gen. Philip Kearny, Jr. in Section 2, Grave S-2, who was killed in the 1862 Battle of Chantilly, think of restoring, under transparent cover, the names of Confederate generals to American military bases?

The present resident of the Oval Office, now a tacky gilded cage, is sending $20 billion to beef up an authoritarian ruler in Argentina while millions of Americans, some of them military, intelligence and law enforcement veterans and their families, wait for meager rations on bread lines.

George Washington, whose monument stands erect across the river, chose to spend the winter of 1777 with his troops at Valley Forge rather than retreating south to host lavish parties — yes, served by black slaves — in his plantation home just downriver at Mt. Vernon.

Or imagine a conversation between General Washington, who that miserable winter ordered his troops to be inoculated against smallpox, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.. Lt. Col. Albert Sabin, Section 3, Grave 1885-RH, might have some thoughts to add.

Perhaps Washington and successors such as Brig. Gen. Benjamin O. Davis, Section 2, Grave 478, the first African-American general in the U.S. Army; his son Brig. Gen Benjamin O. Davis, Jr, the first African-American Air Force general, nearby in Section 2, Grave E 321-RH; and Gen. Colin Powell, Section 60, Grave 11917, might have a Chat with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth about the military virtues of diversity, equity and inclusion.

Washington’s Continentals included black freemen and fugitive slaves in the First Rhode Island Regiment, as well as the Second Canadian Regiment, native Americans and immigrants from nearly every country in Europe. The Union Army included some 180,000 black soldiers, the Irishmen of the Fighting 69th, a German Brigade and as many as 20,000 native Americans.

Much later came the Tuskegee Airmen and the Navajo “code talkers” who played an important role in the defeat of the Japanese Empire by using their native language as an unbreakable code.

While he’s at it, Secretary Hegseth might school himself on the role women have played throughout America’s military history, for 250 years as nurses, supply clerks, seamstresses, spies and secretaries and finally — until now — as combat soldiers and fighter pilots. A stop at Section 21, the “Nurses Section”, home to the tombs of 653 women military veterans, might be in order. A tour of the Women’s Military Memorial to the more than 3 million women who have served the nation since the Revolution is mandatory, sir.

Or perhaps the self-styled Secretary of War might visit Arlington’s Section 2, Grave S-1 and ask Gen. Philip Sheridan about the wisdom of purging the military of “beardos” like him, Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman.

If he did, perhaps Sherman’s voice might echo down to the Pentagon and across the Potomac to the newly amputated White House: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

Maybe, too, amid the talk of annexing Canada, Hegseth might ask the President to join him at the Canadian Cross of Sacrifice, first constructed “in honour of the residents of the United States who served in the Canadian Army and gave their lives in the Great War, 1914-1917”. More than 35,000 of the 40,000 remembered there were U.S. citizens, and the Cross now also honours the Americans who served in Canadian forces in World War II and in Korea.

While the current administration has reduced the NATO alliance that emerged from the ruins of World War II to a series of financial transactions, there is no record of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower summoning French Gen. Charles de Gaulle to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces and demanding that the Free French contribute more to the cost of their country’s liberation.

In contrast to today’s transactional diplomacy, President Harry S Truman said in words etched in the wall of the World War II Memorial on the National Mall: “The heroism of our own troops . . . was matched by that of the armed forces of the nations that fought by our side. They absorbed the blows and they shared to the full in the destruction of the enemy.”

Now many of those nations are absorbing the blows of new tariffs and reluctant to share what their intelligence agencies are collecting, not only about drug smuggling in Latin America, but also about Russia and other nations that were long considered common enemies.

If the nation really is FUBAR, though, what has changed is more than a Commander in Chief who seems more comfortable with authoritarian rulers than he is with the leaders of America’s allies.

Not so long ago, many of the heirs to those buried in Arlington’s hills lived by a motto that began in the Marine Corps: “Officers eat last”. For them, ranks’ responsibilities outranked their privileges.

“A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both,” Eisenhower warned.

By that measure, today’s top heavy nation is in danger. In the private sector, as well as in government, officers too often eat everything and leave only table scraps. According to the Economic Policy Institute, top CEO pay rose by 1,094 percent between 1978 and 2024, while typical workers’ compensation grew 26 percent.

None of those who rest at Arlington were saints. Even without judging those who lived a century ago by today’s standards, their ranks include racists and anti-Semites, at least one rabid anti-Communist and others whose conduct was unbecoming.

But what might they think of today’s America? Is it still the country they devoted and too often gave their lives to serve, save and protect? Perhaps like good soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen, they would look beyond Washington, beyond the polls and the off-year election headlines, beyond those hollowed halls on Capitol Hill, beyond the parts of the White House that remain intact, beyond the mediocrities, miscreants and malefactors of great wealth that now populate the Capital.

In the distance, past the debacles in Vietnam, Beirut, Mogadishu, Iraq and Afghanistan, for which soldiers in the ranks bear too much of the blame that belongs to their superiors and to the politicians who deployed them, perhaps they could still see the America they remember.

It is easy to be cynical, but at times such as this, to be cynical is to surrender, and those among the hills of Arlington did not give up after the defeats they suffered at First Bull Run, in their first encounter with the enemy at Kasserine Pass or after Task Force Smith in Korea.

“Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years,” said Lt. Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Section 3, Grave 856-A. “People grow old only by deserting their ideals.”

Amid the darkness, those ideals still shine. You can see them in the outpouring of support for local food pantries when millions lost their SNAP benefits. In Americans rushing to support their neighbors after floods and fires. In others and Catholic bishops and even some judges protesting and halting ICEy violence. In soldiers and law enforcement and intelligence officers warily asking what might constitute an illegal order. In a new generation of social media protest singers such as Jesse Welles, Mon Rovia and Jensen McCrea (Hat tip: NPR and Isabella Gomez Sarmiento). In a new generation of politicians in both parties seeking solutions rather than scapegoats. In the survivors of the news media still speaking truth to power in the face of threats and intimidation and economic starvation and abandonment by their corporate masters.

In the end, perhaps, looking beyond the barren capital, the veterans of America’s toughest trials can still see an America that remains what Bruce Springsteen called it in 2001 — a Land of Hope and Dreams.

“I said this train, dreams will not be thwarted

“This train, faith will be rewarded

“This train, hear the steel wheels singing

“This train, bells of freedom ringing”

THE SOUNDTRACK;

The Dangling Conversation:

Land of Hope and Dreams:

Making Sense of a Mad Mad World

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