Honoring the soldiers who died over there

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In recent years and recent wars, the men and women who fought and died in Iraq and Afghanistan were brought home to be buried. More than one president has met the transports at Dover Air Force Base in Maryland to salute the fallen soldiers before their remains were passed on to grieving families.

In other times and in other wars, especially World Wars I and II, soldiers were buried on foreign soil. More than 200,000 men and women lie in graves set aside as “American” cemeteries in Europe, often near the bloody battles where they were shot or gassed or felled by bombs. They left America in the springtime of their lives to fight the good fight, and they died at El Alamein and Utah Beach and Somme and Pointe du Hoc and Ardennes and Beallau Wood and the Netherlands and Italy and Belgium. They fell and died and were buried far from home. If you travel to these countries, it feels very good to stop at the American cemeteries and, for just a few minutes, remember who they were and what they sacrificed.

Somehow, the poets always get it right when describing war. Last year I mentioned Wilfred Owen, who wrote about “The old lie: That it is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” He wrote, “If in some smothering dreams you too could pace/ Behind the wagon that we flung him in,/ And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,/ His hanging face,/ My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children, ardent for some desperate glory,/ The old Lie: Dulcet et decorum est pro patria mori . . .”

This week I am thinking about “In Flanders Fields,” another World War I poem many of us were encouraged to memorize in eighth grade, the poem written during battle by a Canadian soldier, Lt. Col. John McCrae. He wrote it on May 3, 1915, after he saw his friend and fellow soldier, Alexis Helmer, die in the Second Battle of Ypres in the Flanders region of Belgium. It was there that the Germans launched one of the first chemical attacks in the history of war.

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