The graves of the Marines I lost
For those who have lost loved ones in battle, a different and quieter sort of memorializing is likely to take place in homes, churches and neighborhood cemeteries. “I miss you” posts will be left on Facebook pages remembering lost sons and daughters. Veterans will gather with their former units, recalling buddies over beer and burgers. Parents, children and spouses will lay wildflowers, notes and bottles of liquor near simple gravesites in remote towns. These are the places where so many service members come from and where so many return to in death.
Created after the Civil War, Memorial Day is an odd holiday, at once a solemn commemoration of those killed in war and a day of beach outings and backyard barbecues celebrating the start of summer. Rarely does it serve as a time to reflect on the policies that led to all those deaths.
While in Iraq and Afghanistan, I witnessed military officers and enlisted soldiers, at all ranks, being held accountable for their decisions. I have yet to see that happen with Washington policymakers who, far removed from the battlefields, benefit from our collective amnesia about past military and foreign policy failures.
The commander-in-chief and the senior military brass should leave the manicured grounds of Arlington and visit some of those places where most of America’s war dead are buried: farm towns, immigrant neighborhoods and working-class suburbs. At a time when fewer and fewer of us have any real ties to the military, how better to remind the nation that our troops are not just faceless volunteers, but people who live next door?
Over the last four years, I have visited a dozen such cemeteries. One was in Newcastle, Wyoming (population 3,532, according to the last census), where Staff Sgt. Brian Bland was laid to rest on a hill overlooking an oil refinery and a Pizza Hut. His granite headstone is shaped like a mountain peak.
Outside Cherokee, Iowa (population 5,253), at the Galva Veterans Memorial, I stood at Cpl. Nathan Schubert’s grave, next to his father’s, surrounded by green cornfields and grain silos. Etched on his headstone are pine trees and pheasants in flight.
In Menard, Texas (population 1,471), I located Capt. Paul Christopher Alaniz, buried alongside his mother. Colorful ceramic tiles adorned his grave’s concrete plot, hand-painted by his wife and children with the words “Love” and “Papa, Happy Father’s Day” and “A classy tie for a classy guy.”
I visited each one because I was directly involved in the decision that led to their deaths.
In late 2004, Marine commanders in Al Anbar province and I, the State Department representative in Fallujah, needed a strategy to secure polling sites in violent western Iraq ...(Continued on next page)
so that Iraqis, particularly Sunnis, would be able to vote. I argued that Marines should be sent to far-flung villages to protect local residents as they voted. Dunford, who was back then a brigadier general, wisely pushed for keeping Marines concentrated in the largest population centers. During a final meeting, I pulled civilian rank and overruled the headquarter staff officers. Within a few days, the election-support mission was widened to locations across Al Anbar.
In the early hours of Jan. 26, 2005, one of two large Marine helicopters transporting troops for this expanded and therefore riskier mission crashed, killing all onboard: 30 Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman. The accident would remain the single-largest casualty incident in either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. On polling day, Jan. 30, only a small percentage of Sunnis voted in the vast province, just as Anbari leaders had predicted.
I promised myself that night that I would visit all 31 gravesites. I needed to get a sense of where these military service members came from: the schools and churches they attended; the streets where they learned to drive; the neighborhoods where many of their families still lived. This now decade-old promise, I knew, would be only the beginning of a lifelong personal reckoning.
Some gravesites I’ve gone to are closer to home. After much searching, I found the tombstone of my great-uncle Harold, who served in the Battle of the Bulge and died, most likely a suicide, after returning from World War II with a drinking problem. He was interred in a ramshackle cemetery in Pinto, Utah (population fewer than a dozen), reachable only by washboard-rough dirt roads, where rattlesnakes, jackrabbits and lizards seek shade under sagebrush and juniper trees. PERHAPS IT is surprising that some Iraqis and Afghans still hold favorable views of America. And yet I receive regular emails and calls from friends there. When astronaut Neil Armstrong passed away in August 2012, the only note I received from anyone, including all my American friends and relatives, was from a young Afghan medical doctor, Jamshid. From Jalalabad, a dangerous city on the easternmost edge of Afghanistan in a region once frequented by Osama bin Laden, he wrote: “So sad about the death of nail armstrong he was the real poineer who had shown his heroism & persuade human to seek & try more and has made clear that nothing is impassable.”
It took an Afghan friend to remind me of this enduring story. And it reminded me of my father, a zoologist and amateur astronomer. In Vietnam – like Iraq, another unnecessary war – he was an infantry sergeant flying between Saigon and Pleiku under a full moon when Armstrong took his famous step in 1969.
That night in Iraq when I heard about the helicopter crash and the 31 servicemen who had died, I was devastated. It was late, but I went out on a run, hoping it would bring some calm. It did not. But a ritual of my own was born. Since returning home, I have learned that the best way to get to know America’s war dead is to put on my running shoes before sunrise and pace along the quiet streets where they lived and loved before fighting and dying in America’s longest wars.
These are the places where America’s war dead are best known and still mourned. Not just on Memorial Day, but every day.
J. Kael Weston, the author of ‘The Mirror Test: America at War in Iraq and Afghanistan,’ was a State Department official in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 to 2010.