I grew up next to Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in South St. Louis. Every day as you drive by, you see white marble markers stretch in perfect rows through bright green grass all the way to the Mississippi. On spring mornings, the mist comes in from the river and settles in catlike curls over the tombstones. At night, fluorescent lights illumine blacktop roadways that twist and sway up the hillside through the dotted grid of engraved names and dates.
The oldest stones come from the civil war era and are so weathered you can’t read their writing. You hope that someone knows who’s buried where-maybe they have the information filed away in the hundred year-old buildings that hold records.
I drive through on a sunny summer day three years ago. A score of old coffins sit unearthed on the outskirts. They are moving them to make room for a Wal-Mart. The cemetery doesn’t need the land. My great-grandmother is buried here, and so is my grandfather. I don’t plan to be buried here.
The barracks itself is ten feet from the (now defunct) St. Bernadette Catholic Grade School soccer field. Retired tanks and trucks rust in long grass, and the occasional man in camouflage pokes a head out now and again. There is a rifle range, memorial statues and buildings for operative training. But it is not an active barracks in the sense that privates train there. Much like the cemetery, it is quiet, old and largely uninhabited.
I was in the fourth grade during Desert Storm. I remember watching the national news invade The Wonder Years with maps of Iraq and definitions of things like SCUD missiles. I saw explosions in foreign countries. I saw lights fly through the night sky. It was all safe and far away. I wasn’t worried. I wasn’t proud. I learned long division next to 100,000 dead soldiers, and I didn’t think about it.
I won’t tell a lie. I owned a tie-dyed American flag T-shirt I wore sheepishly. I bought a couple packs of Topps Desert Storm trading cards from the dime store, not because I wanted them, but because I felt like I ought to buy them-the proceeds went to build more.big weapons. I flipped through them once or twice-slick, glossed, professionally shot images of fighter jets, foot soldiers and big, metal war machines-with stats on the back. These were not good things. These were not pitchers and rookies and shortstops, but somebody was saying they ought to be.
Two weeks ago, I didn’t know what patriotism was. I go to fireworks shows on Fourth of July. I stand up for the National Anthem. That’s about it. The most resonating symbol of American-ness for me was Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s disease; we were, literally in some sense, a country that could not remember herself.
Last Tuesday, September 11th, our country remembered in a way we will never forget. All of a sudden, I was an American. I had to be. I wanted to be. I was glad I was. For the first time in my life, I entertained, if only for a moment, the possibility of enlisting. As England’s Royal Guard played the National Anthem on ABC, Peter Jennings teared up. So did I. “That,” said Jennings, “is solidarity.”
Both my grandfathers are veterans of World War II. My uncle dodged the draft during Vietnam. When it came time to fill out my own draft card at age eighteen, I did so disdainfully-after letting it sit on my desk for many months. As I write this, as many as 100 B-1 Bombers, F-15 and F-16 fighter jets are on their way to the Persian Gulf. We are at war. For the first time in many of our lives, we are at war. It could be good. It probably won’t be. We don’t know.