Section 60

By Clint Collins

Memorial Day has always been a time of remembrance for me, and those memories run deep.  As a child, I would help members of the local Veterans of Foreign Wars post place flags on the headstones of all the veterans buried in the two cemeteries in my little hometown of Centralia, Missouri.  Both my father and grandfather were members of the post, having served in Vietnam and in Europe during World War II.  Today, memory fails me as to whether I began helping with the flags because of a conscious decision on my part or because I provided a young set of legs to assist an aging group of war vets, but after many years of walking the rows of headstones I’ve found it has had a profound impact on my thoughts.

One of the things I remember clearly from my time spent honoring those veterans was looking at their date of birth and date of death.  I suppose that in my childish immaturity, I was looking for what I thought was one of the “true heroes” — somebody who was killed in combat.  My overly romanticized notions of the glory of warfare prevented me from seeing that everyone who served in time of war was a true hero.  In reality, I was just looking for one of the unfortunate heroes whose journey ended on a battlefield far from home instead of in the land he or she was simply trying to serve.  I like to think I’ve learned a few things since then.

A lesson that continues to weigh heavily on my conscience came some time later, when I was a 26-year-old officer in the Oklahoma National Guard.  As a chaplain candidate, I was one of the few people in the U.S. military who were nondeployable during these last years of ongoing warfare.  However, I helped work an SRP — Soldier Readiness Processing — for members of the Oklahoma Guard who were preparing for deployment to Iraq.  Before every deployment, one of many checks soldiers must undergo is verifying that their religious preference information is accurate, so that their chaplain can better serve them while overseas. The pain of my lesson was having to look young soldiers square in the eye while knowing that I was helping to send them off to war.  Even at 26, I was old enough to look at some of them and think, “They’re only kids…”

Now on the eve of my 30th birthday and having been out of the military for two years, that weekend continues to haunt me.  According to Department of Defense statistics, through May 2, 2009, 4,273 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq.  Of those, 1,252 were under the age of 22 and another 1,040 are between 22 and 24.  Add in those between the age of 25 and 30 and you’ve accounted for 79% of the casualties in Iraq: 3,380 true heroes.

Every Memorial Day, I’m treated to what might as well be stock footage of a wreath laying and the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.  And I say that not out of disrespect for those who watch over the graves of our national heroes, but out of disappointment that we never see any footage of Section 60, the portion of Arlington National Cemetery reserved for the fallen veterans of the Iraq War.  I fear it is all too easy to remember the unknown soldiers of wars gone by and forget about the price of the conflict we have now: a relatively anonymous 3,380 teenagers and twenty-somethings.

When I was young, I would have foolishly hailed them as the true heroes.  Now that I’ve grown a few days wiser, I mourn them as the ones who have lost the most.  It is their lives that have been mortgaged to finance our collective debts.  Perhaps it’s out of a sense of shame or a desire for willful ignorance, but this is a topic we never seem to want to discuss.  When we go to war, we should acknowledge who is doing the fighting while we clamor for security at home.

If we as a nation ever pause to reflect on this question, we will find that our answer awaits us in Section 60.

Clint Collins is pastor of First Christian Church in Tahlequah, Okla.