A Memorial

Memorial:

Corporal Glenn Watkins, husband and father, volunteered to remain an extra year in Iraq in order to serve with his old unit. He was killed by a VBIED, the first combat casualty suffered by his battalion. Asked why he had chosen to stay, he said, "Sir -- someone’s got to teach these guys the ropes."

Another in his unit describes the memorial:

What bothered me most. Though, was all the pomp that went with it. It could have been much simpler, a formation, the field cross, and some words about the man. This was to parade ground, it was somebody's idea of how to have a memorial, like a movie set and we were all just actors in the scene.... To me it cheapened the man's life and all he sacrificed by extending an extra year so he could serve with his old friends in Alpha.

How to say what wants to be said? Not two miles from my house is a mass grave. I have never walked by it without finding fresh flowers there, and little flags -- both American and Confederate -- left around it, posted into the ground on dowel rods.

They died in the hospitals following First and Second Manassas, among so many others that individual graves could not be made for them. Nor could their companions pause even so long as to bury them: that was done by civilians, and their graves were marked only by wooden markers written by schoolchildren. When those markers were used for firewood in 1863's bitter winter, the names were lost for more than a hundred years.

Yet their honor is not less for how they were memorialized. A grateful citizenry tends their graves to this day. When records were discovered in 1982 listing the names of 520 of the 600 dead, a group of such civilians raised a memorial over the mass grave, with the names written this time in stone.

It is a kindness that the tempo of this war is such that we have time to memorialize our dead, and to write their names on our hearts as well as on their markers. We have time to hear their stories, remarkable each one.

To Corporal Watkins.