The cemetery in Normandy, just above Omaha Beach, is among the most sacred of places. In a reverential stillness broken only by nature, row after row of white crosses and Stars of David mark the final resting places of nearly 10,000 American soldiers, many of whom fell on the nearby beaches, on the cliffs or in the hedgerows.
The wind, the cries of the birds, the pounding of the surf below: These eternal, immutable sounds amplify the silence of the graves, and make them speak to us with nearly unbearable poignancy.
A nation may be judged by how it honors its war dead, whether in vainglorious triumph or in somber meditation. America has always chosen the latter, allowing the very absence of glory to proclaim its presence — and our national resolve.
From Normandy across the Atlantic to Arlington National Cemetery and then across the Pacific to Punchbowl Cemetery in Honolulu, the scope and size of America’s wars are symbolized by the headstones that mark the fallen. Their loss is the price our nation has always been willing to pay for honor and freedom.
And not just ours.
France is often considered hostile to America these days, but in the villages of Normandy, American flags still fly from stone farmhouses, impromptu D-Day museums dot the landscape, and American visitors are as welcome as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers who first hit the beach in June 1944.
And everybody knows why.
From Chosin to Fallujah, Khe Sahn to Kandahar, America has continued to pay the price.
Memorial Day originated as Decoration Day, in the aftermath of the Civil War. In that deadliest of conflicts, we lost some 618,000 people, on both sides — including President Abraham Lincoln, who lived less than a week after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.
Better than anyone, Lincoln knew what a powerful force the memory of the dead could be; that, even in death, the soldier fights on by inspiring others by his moral and physical courage. No one ever spoke more eloquently about the “last full measure of devotion” than the president who arrived at the Gettysburg battlefield just four months after the decisive battle of the Civil War to say:
“We can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground,” he said.
“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
“It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”
There will be other wars after Iraq and Afghanistan, and more soldiers will die in the “unfinished work” to which Lincoln alluded — for that work can never be finished.
The struggle for personal sovereignty against totalitarian coercion — no matter what “ism” it goes by — likely won’t end ’til Judgment Day. Eternal vigilance really is the price of liberty.
So we mourn our dead, even as we salute their sacrifice.
They are our silent sentinels, forever on watch. On that lonely, windswept clifftop in Normandy, and in countless other places around the world, they serve their country still.