This is Flag Day, when Americans celebrate and show respect for our flag, its designers, and makers over the past two hundred plus years. So on this day I want to honor three men I don’t really know, but whose graves I visited in the past few days. Each grave bore an American flag.
I don’t even remember their last name now, but it doesn’t matter. What I remember is that the last name was the same. What I remember is that all three are buried in the Military Cemetery at Sackets Harbor, NY. What I remember is that they were all young.
It’s the ages that stuck. Two of the men were seventeen and eighteen respectively, and they died in the Korean War in 1950 with the ranks of Private and Private First Class. They were brothers in the same family, and they died less than two months apart.
The third grave, the one in the middle, belonged to their father who died two years later. Perhaps he died of a broken heart, having lost his children in one chilling summer. Perhaps he would have died if they had come home, but we’ll never know. According to what the tombstones revealed, he was born in 1910, served in World War II, and saw his sons serve in Korea. He died in 1952 at the age of forty-two, within two years of his sons’ deaths.
For this reason, these graves struck me just as personally as those ancestral graves my aunt and I spent an entire day visiting. I’m not sure why, but maybe it’s because a gravesite with its birth and death dates reduces us all to our basic elements. We are born; we die. What we do in-between cannot be ledgered on a tombstone; instead it has to be engraved in the memories of our family and friends. I hope those three who sleep beneath the tombstones in Sackets Harbor are remembered fully and faithfully.
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