There’s an elegiac tone to this week’s magazine. It’s appropriate, for this is the final issue we will publish in Military Appreciation Month and our two main stories are about endings: the ending of a tradition, the ends that give meaning to military lives, and the ends to which servicemen — it’s mostly men — come when they get back from war.
Our cover story is a feature written by Jay Caruso about Rolling Thunder, the organization that since 1987 has brought millions of bikers to Washington to draw attention to the plight of men and women captured or missing in action in foreign wars. The bikers ride past the Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson memorials, creating a dignified if unconventional tableau for the little guy against a backdrop of monuments to the great. For those of us who live and work in the federal capital, it’s become an annual rite of late spring to have the National Mall taken over by an enormous cavalcade of gleaming Harleys, sometimes with sidecars, usually ridden by middle-aged or elderly citizens wearing patriotic colors, and always contributing to a roar that must provoke Zeus to envy.
