vividreports: Fort McPherson National Cemetery

Tonight we are at Jerry and Maggie Hochberger's home in Bartlett, IL. We arrived at about 6:30p.m., had a nice supper of various items from a local Polish Deli, visited, watched an old episode of LaVerne and Shirley on TV, and now everyone has settled in for the night. We drive today from Council Bluffs, IA, after a pretty restless night in a motel there. It was a relatively uneventful trip today, good weather, no stops except for gas and snacks and a stretch or two. We listened to the final lectures of the course on Cultural Intelligence, which proved to be quite interesting. I read aloud from the collection of M. L. King, Jr.'s writings (edited by Cornel West), this time a piece titled The World House, a plea for the urgency of world-wide peace and understanding and an end to the global evils of racism, poverty and militarism. As relevant today as it was when it was written in 1967, only more so, but also sadder because everything King predicted would result from inaction then has come to pass in spades fifty years later, plus the situation is now vastly more complicated by the additional evil of the impact of global warming due to fossil fuel consumption. We also listened a good deal today to NPR, which never fails to be interesting.

Yesterday, as we drove from Boulder, through Nebraska, to Council Bluffs, Ellen asked if I could find an interesting place on the map where we could get out and walk, and I said, "Well, at the next exit at Maxwell, NE, there is the Fort McPherson National Cemetery." So we exited, and it was a discovery. It was a perfect place to walk: it was lovely, quiet, we were virtually alone, and there was much of interest. Over 10,000 veterans and their spouses are buried there. There is something uniquely affecting by the sight of uniform white grave markers laid out absolutely evenly spaced in long rows. At first, it seemed to be the invariable rule that the male's name (usually the veteran) was on the east side of the marker, and the female's name - the spouse - on the west side, but closer examination disproved that. In one section, it was just the reverse, and we soon saw that in many cases, the female was the veteran, not the male. In some sections, the markers were spaced such that there would be room for two caskets, but in others, they were so close together, there could only be room for one or two urns. The cemetery was established in 1863 - the first burial was of a U. S. soldier who was guarding the construction of the railroad through Nebraska, who was killed in an attack by Native Americans. We saw his grave. But I would estimate from our perusal that 80% of the graves were post 1990! Many we saw were post 2010. So this is still a very active cemetery. Any U.S. Veteran and his or her spouse, from anywhere in the world, is eligible to be buried there, free of charge. Plus dependent children, and in some cases other family members.

I wondered if any of my father's "congregation" from WW II, men in the 1314th Engineers Regiment, all of whom were African-Americans, might be buried there. Were troops segregated in life, integrated in death? I guess my question might have been answered when I learned later that scores of "Buffalo Soldiers" are in fact buried there - the name given to the freed slaves who fought with the Union Army in the Civil War.