Looking for peace and a safe place to be outdoors, I’ve made several visits since March to walk in Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. I’ve been surprised to see so few other visitors to this magnificent site, virtually deserted on my trips. On one visit I did meet a man, older like me and similarly motivated. He approached, thinking I was a cemetery employee because I had pencil and paper in hand and was writing down names of the interred for this essay. He was poorly dressed and looked haggard. He said he had already come several times as a reaction to losing his job due to the pandemic and thinking about his deceased parents, looking for solace. His father was a veteran and was buried with his wife in the Midwest. Could I tell him whether there was still space at Rosecrans where they could be reinterred? I replied I did not work there but had consulted the cemetery website, which indicated it was full. He looked disappointed, even bereft.
Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, crowning Point Loma’s seabound ridge, is a vast public symbol, a monument, enveloping a multitude of subsidiary symbols like a fruit cradling seeds. It’s a secular shrine, belonging to all of us. Its immense dignity rests in part on its thorough simplicity: quiet except for the wind; free and open to all from sunrise to sunset; its broad, immaculate, undulating lawns of unvarying green; and, of course, the tens of thousands of uniformly spaced white grave markers and niches for cremated remains. The incomparable site is surely one of the highest points within San Diego’s city limits. Lying on a peninsula, it is tethered to the mass of our continental nation, the nation served by those honored there. Simultaneously, in its stillness, it faces a sky and an ocean whose expanses contradict time and identity. It blends peace and pathos. From its quiet heights, a visitor can scan a remote, dramatic vista taking in all that defines the San Diego of the living: Downtown, freeways, harbor, military installations, coast and mountains, Balboa Park, airport, residential neighborhoods, the border with Tijuana.
The fabulous range of names of the interred testifies to the awesome scope of our national experience. A selection of the less-common names drives this home with poetry and refreshes awareness of our astounding diversity:
Aebi • Anettsman • Antelline • Baldiga • Boeing • Brosteaux • Buaiz • Buchala • Butters • Cederquist • Coursey • DeCoux • Dicioccio • Galceran • Goings • Gorence • Grapatin • Gundelfinger • Hoey • Jocis • Lamo • Lochowitz • Maraist • McQuary • Megaris • Morning • Nobelius • Pepe • Piety • Pilgrim • Pion • Pomplun • Poort • Ramthun • Reifsnider • Ronimus • Tantama • Tenhuren • Salonen • Sceusa • Shequen • Sight • Sloop • Suora • Szakais • Vevia • Wiersig • Yonemura
I have always been struck by the cemetery’s quiet majesty. One Christmas years ago, I was moved by hundreds of identical pine wreaths with red ribbons that had been hung on gravestones. It was as if the living, out of love, deemed that the interred still deserved to participate in the holiday. Visiting the site alone several times since the pandemic struck, I have found it spurs meditation on who the buried were, how they experienced their time of service to their nation, and how I should think about my belonging … in this phase of tense, divisive national self-evaluation.
There is a long list of documented heroes lying at rest in the cemetery, and of people who lost their lives in conflict. There is a striking number of interments, next to their parents, of children who died at or shortly after birth. So for all its beauty, it is by no means a refuge from awareness of suffering. And not all the honored were saints or heroes, of course. The screening of who is entitled to burial does not include a background check on lifetime rectitude!
That variety of experience and character, alongside the irrefutable evidence of death, led me to ask, “Would I have made that commitment in those circumstances?,” “Have I been selfless enough,” “Would I have stood up to the fear?” “Could I have borne the losses?” My questions recalled the piercing scene in “Saving Private Ryan” where the aging veteran saved through the ultimate sacrifice of other soldiers implores his wife to tell him whether he has been a good man. (I was of draft age during the Vietnam conflict but got draft lottery number 180, high enough to avoid conscription. My father and all my uncles served in World War II. Only one uncle, a Marine, saw combat and fought in the brutal Battle of Guadalcanal.)
During one of my walks around the site’s periphery, a cool wind pushed a detached four-by-six-and-a-quarter-inch U.S. flag across my path. I have it in front of me, and treasure it, as I write this piece. In my meditative mood, I picked it up and held it in my hands. I immediately thought about it as the supreme national symbol of our commonality, under stress at this time, and what coincidence brought it fluttering into my view in the midst of a monument to national belonging. It’s the emblem that flew over our slavery system before the Civil War but also the banner raised at Iwo Jima in the immortal photograph. I firmly believe it should be carried with respect — unmodified for the purpose of making a partisan point, without derision — at all demonstrations for freedom and justice, however divergent the values inspiring those demonstrations might be. It can contribute to our national strength, and unite us, as a reminder of our highest aspirations, alongside other artifacts and gestures such as the national cemeteries, the Pledge of Allegiance, and patriotic music. None of these things should become the exclusive property of one faction or another. Their redemptive power is real and should be acknowledged, despite all the itted ambiguities of their history. I suspect that without regard for these symbols the way out of our destructive divisions may be harder.
In 2020, I have valued this power in a very personal way. Our crisis in race relations has pushed me to re-see personal memories of where I stood as a relatively privileged White child and a youth growing up in America’s undeniable system of injustice and oppression. In the sixties, as a college student I marched for racial justice and against the war in Vietnam and worked as a summer intern for a Black farmers cooperative in Selma, Alabama. But there have been other, long-dormant memories of situations illustrating in ways painfully specific to my own life the patterns of injustice properly decried in 2020.
As a pupil in the Flint, Michigan public schools, I attended a completely integrated first grade then, successively, all-White, integrated, and all-White elementary schools, followed by an integrated junior high school. There was one public system for all, with schools enrolling different numbers of Black and White children depending on the racial make-up of the surrounding areas. But with the exception of my first grade, classrooms inside the school buildings attended by both races were strictly segregated by skin color, which I was jolted into seeing only now, more than 50 years later. I recall no overt hostility toward the Black children, but White people as a group quietly inflicted insidious discrimination on a less powerful group through a policy of “semi-segregation.” I cannot escape thinking how many Black lives were forever stunted by this practice. I am troubled by my decades of blindness to what was a daily reality in my life.
I am also the direct heir to benefits gained at the expense of Indigenous Americans, and I actively compounded the wrong committed by my forebears.
My ancestors were early farmers, and so landowners, in the state of Indiana, around 1840. The oldest ancestor I know of, Samuel Moore, donated land for the Huntington County Quaker meeting house and cemetery. As a child, I roamed the fields and woods of my grandfather’s nearby farm in the valley of the Wabash River. Only this year, by ing the Fort Wayne public library, one of America’s foremost centers of family and regional history, did I learn how my forebears originally got their land. The details were dismaying. The U.S. government signed treaties with the resident tribes and then deployed the military, flying the Stars and Stripes, to drive them west of the Mississippi. Local land offices were set up to allocate the stolen lands to settlers, and land ed promptly into Samuel Moore’s possession.
Unfortunately, as a heedless teenager I re-enacted the essence of this drama. I was staying in my parents’ hometown with siblings and cousins, all Samuel’s descendants. The 19th-century house of one of the few remaining Miami Indians, Chief LaFontaine, stood on a wooded hill close to my grandfather’s farm, but I had never seen it because of a screen of trees. Just recently, the state had removed the trees to build a highway, exposing the house to view. As we had for years, the five of us were roaming, saw the house, and decided to take a closer look. At that point, shamefully, we essentially became a little White youth gang attacking a Native American legacy.
The house was empty but intact. We started our fun by throwing rocks to break all the windows. When the glass on one window was completely cleared, my cousin Steve pulled himself up on the sill and started through, head-first. We surely all would have followed and done more damage had the owner not driven up at that very moment and jumped out of his car to confront us. To our very limited credit, we didn’t run but stayed to face the music. We successfully pleaded with the owner not to inform, and humiliate, our elderly grandfather and avoided what would have been well-deserved punishment.
We certainly had not been consciously hostile to Native Americans but nonetheless acted out an ugly little incident enabled by history and our unearned social position. It was mildly sickening to juxtapose in my mind our vandalism with my family’s enjoyment of the wealth deriving from dispossession of the indigenous population.
So I have fallen short of my best, as we all do. Many times, our failures are small components of larger social misdeeds, as in the stories told here. The events of this pivotal year 2020 have cast an unforgiving light on how our nation’s powerful have not saved the poor and the least privileged from paying a disproportionate price for our national glories. By themselves the finest of our national symbols, embodied by Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery lying near the heart of our community, cannot redeem this. However, thoughtful, respectful calls on our American sisters and brothers ed there for their service can help show us the path to lessening the gravity of our offenses through courage and dedication. I recommend the national cemetery as a priceless place to “re-create” alongside our better-known parks, beaches and mountains.
