We Americans, like those in other countries, are prone to a sort of hero worship when memorializing our nation’s greats. We carve out monuments in their honor, give their names to schools and post offices, and place their faces on postage stamps. Sometimes we even give them their own holiday.
Yet one of those holidays, Memorial Day, is unique in that it is dedicated to those who are, at the same time, the most deserving of such an honor and yet the most forgotten.
While American children are taught the names of the presidents and generals who led our country during conflict, too little attention is paid to the hundreds of thousands of young privates and corporals who died fighting the wars which made such men memorable. Of course, this ignorance isn’t malicious in origin. Intuitively, history remembers movers and shakers much more often than those who actually did the shaking and the moving.
Yet if we truly desire to honor those who gave their lives in the defense of our nation, then perhaps we must begin to shift our attention from the faces on Mount Rushmore to the names that are inscribed upon the common headstones that dot the hills of Arlington, Va.
The key to starting this shift perhaps lies in Arlington National Cemetery itself, in a section which hosts one of our nation’s greatest commanders, John Pershing, though you’d never notice it.
In a grassy field in the northwest corner of Arlington National Cemetery lies a simple headstone just like the thousands which surround it. It appears to be made of the same familiar white marble seen throughout Washington, D.C., and stands exactly 2 feet tall. Inscribed into the very top of the stone’s face is a cross, then written right below is the name John J. Pershing. As mandated by the federal government, Pershing’s rank, “General of the Armies of the United States,” is also included, under the optional reference to his home state of Missouri, almost as if to diminish the rank’s importance.
The simplicity of his headstone, the design of which is shared by all of the soldiers who surround him, is a curious one, considering his position. He is one of only two men to ever bare such a high title — the highest in the entire military, above even a five-star general. The second officer to hold the rank is, fittingly, none other than George Washington, who was awarded the honor posthumously in 1978.
For a man of such high military distinction, it is surprising he wasn’t laid to rest under an elaborate memorial, such as the many other colonels and generals who are buried in Arlington. Instead, he lies beneath the same unassuming headstone shared by the 400,000 others, privates and sergeants among them, that are interred in that field by the Potomac.
The casual observer, untouched by the grim reality of war that caused so many to be prematurely laid to rest at Arlington, might assume that exceptional humility must have motivated Pershing to request such a burial. But this assumption is far too superficial, for it fails to see Arlington through the lens familiar to all who have fought overseas wearing our nation’s uniform.
By requesting that he share the same headstone of the soldiers he led in World War I, Pershing acknowledged the terrible secret which is intimately known by all who served in combat overseas: that rank and medals mean nothing when compared to the sacrifice of a life. The teenage private who is killed in action within his first day in theater ultimately gave more to the effort than any of his surviving peers.
It is he, and not the war’s commanders or politicians, who are the most deserving of high honor and distinction. It is he who is most deserving of a grand monument.
Arlington National Cemetery is but a public manifestation of the truth carried by all veterans of our conflicts overseas. While the wars are started by distant politicians and commanded by well-known generals, it is our country’s young sons and daughters, the ones laid to rest under simple, unassuming headstones, who ultimately bare the high cost for so little recognition.
This Memorial Day, let us take special care to remember the young privates and corporals, the Sgt. Hunters and Spc. Harrises who dot the rolling hills of Arlington. After all, Pershing, the only man militarily equal to George Washington himself, did, and rightly so.
Kevin Petersen is a student at Columbia University and a U.S. Army veteran of Operation Freedom’s Sentinel in Afghanistan.
