Memorial Day Weekend at Fort Snelling

[MineralMan]

My wife and I took her mother out to Fort Snelling yesterday to visit her husband's gravesite. He served during WWII and Korea as an enlisted man in the army and returned to live to the age of 86 years. I am always in awe when I visit any national cemetary and see the rows and rows of markers for some of those who served their nation in the military. As an aging USAF veteran, I'm always aware of the sacrifices those men and women made during their youthful years.

While standing in front of my father-in-law's headstone, I looked around at some of the other markers. Flowers and flags abounded, as you would expect on Memorial Day weekend. But, atop a marker near my father-in-law's I spotted a couple of coins. A quarter and a penny. I tried to imagine what that 26 cents meant to whomever had visited the gravesite. Or was it just a coincidence of some kind?

Looking around further, I noticed another headstone with something atop it. Walking over, I saw that someone had put three small stones on the marker. They were not smooth pebbles, but jagged rocks of limestone, with small fossils imbedded in them. I imagined that they came from a place the man had lived or visited.

I began to look further around the memorial cemetery, to see if there were more such items left on the tops of headstones. Indeed there were. On one, two nickels were placed carefully. On another, eight pennies, arranged in groups of two, and punctuated with a single hazelnut.

I was deeply and inexplicably touched by these headstones. Their meanings were incomprehensible to me, but obviously had symbolic importance to the family members who came that weekend to remember someone who had served the nation.

I would have liked to have walked more of the Fort Snelling cemetery. I would have looked for and examined more of these impromptu memorial items. I would have tried to puzzle out their meanings, but would have failed, I'm sure, as I did with the few I did see.

www.osomin.com

[frazzled]

1. Perhaps they were Jewish

In Judaism, it is traditional to leave a stone atop a headstone when visiting the grave of a family member or friend.

[MineralMan]

2. That could be, but the headstone had

a cross on it, not a Magen David. That doesn't rule it out, of course.

[frazzled]

3. I just saw this on CNN at Arlington National Cemetery

Among the rows of headstones with crosses there was one with a Magen David, which indeed had some stones placed atop. But then there were stones on the grave next to it, which bore a cross. So perhaps someone who was Jewish came to remember a friend or fellow soldier at Fort Snelling. As for the coins, who knows... perhaps it was an old joke between a veteran and his deceased buddy.

This is somewhat poignant to me, because I spoke with my mother just today, and she was telling me how my father (who turns 93 this year, and served in the Army Air Corps in the South Pacific during WWII) had recently asked about a squadron mate who had never shown up to any of the reunions, etc. My father had gone home after four years and 60 missions, but he still wondered, after all these years about this fellow soldier, "a kid." Didn't you know, they told him, that after you left his plane flew into the side of a mountain? My father was crushed ... and after all those many many years, he mourned for this young man ("He was just a kid!") from far-away Utah. The bonds between these soldiers, regardless of background or religion, seem to last forever.

It's also an opportunity to for me to plug the Jewish War Veterans, of which my dad has proudly served as a member for many years. Like African-Americans, it is often little known that Jews have served in the military since the beginning of our nation's founding. In fact, the Jewish War Veterans is the oldest active veterans' organization in America, founded in 1896. Today, we recognize also that Muslim-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, and the many other kinds of Americans that make up our nation, have all served bravely and selflessly.

This weekend, an elderly veteran was selling poppies outside the drugstore when we pulled up. I handed my husband some money to make a donation, and then said, "Ask him where he served!" (I knew how much these guys like to tell, after all the years). My husband got quite the earful. This man had been born in Modena, Italy ("where Pavarotti was from!"), and came to the U.S. when he was sixteen. Three or so years later, he was fighting for the U.S. in WWII, in the European theater. After the war ended in Europe they were going to send him to Japan, but when they learned he was Italian, they sent him to Modena, where he reunited with family he had not seen for a long time. Such stories these fellows (and women) have to tell. Ask a veteran next time you see them.

[MineralMan]

4. Yes, they do have stories to tell, and

if we don't ask them to tell their stories, the stories may be lost soon. I get new stories out of my 85-year-old father every time I talk to him. He was a B-17 pilot in WWII. When he (and I) were much younger, he wouldn't talk about his war experiences. Now, that I'm in my 60s and he's in his 80's, there's no such reticence. I served in the USAF, too, but never in a combat area.

We really, really need to talk to our veterans. The WWII and Korean war veterans are slipping away from us at a frightening rate.

[BeFree]

5. My story

Dad was a vet who had so many sad stories. He never had to fire a gun in self defense but he knew many who did. He, as best can we determine, died from radiation he received during nuclear testing. Healthy as a horse right up until he got an 'unexplainable' sickness.

End of my Memorial day story.