The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
On October 24, 1921, Sgt. Edward F. Younger,
approached four identical caskets laid in the city hall of Chalons-sur-Marne in
France. Sgt. Younger had, himself, been
badly wounded in combat, been highly decorated for valor and received the
Distinguished Service Medal. But he was
alive, and on this day he had an awesome task.
The four caskets before him had each been exhumed, quite at random, on
Memorial day, 1921, from four World War I American cemeteries in France. Each contained the remains of a soldier who
had been unrecognizable and unknown at the time of his burial. All anyone will ever know about these four
bodies is that they were American soldiers and had fallen in “The War to End
all Wars.” Younger’s task was both
simple and agonizing. He would select
one of these caskets for internment in the newly created Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier. Sgt. Younger moved forward (at
what impulse we will never know) and placed a spray of white roses on the third
casket from the left.
That
casket was transported to Washington, D.C. on the USS Olympia, while the
remaining three were interred in the Meuse Argonne Cemetery in France. The casket Younger chose lay in state at the
Capitol until Armistice Day, November 11, 1921, when President Warren G.
Harding interred the body in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
This
national memorial to all of America’s fallen and unknown soldiers has since
grown to include unknowns from World War II, the Korean Conflict and (briefly)
from the Vietnam War. [The remains from
that tomb were exhumed and identified through DNA analysis in 1998. That crypt has been empty ever since and
replaced with a plaque that simply says “Honoring and Keeping Faith with
America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958-1975.”]
And
that brings us to the current weather in Washington, D.C. and its environs.
A mammoth snow storm is
dumping unrelenting snow from the Carolinas to the Canadian Maritime Provinces. The
governors of New York, New Jersey, Delaware and other states have asked (in
some cases insisted) that citizens stay home. There is one remarkable exception to the
universal call for Americans to stay home, hunker down and put in abeyance all
habitual activities. In Arlington
Cemetery, the soldiers who keep eternal watch over the Tomb of the Unknown
Soldier, continue to march their constant, steady, sharp-eyed detail. They never stop. Covered in snow, pelted in rain, buffeted by
wind, on the hottest days and the coldest, they never stop. They marched during Hurricane Sandy!
The tomb sentinels from
the “Old Guard” the Army’s 3rd Regiment are selected from across the
country. It is rigorous training and
most who enter it don’t make it to the end.
Those who do become a brotherhood of fierce pride. During this storm, as every other day, a “relief”
of six soldiers will guard the tomb for a 24-hour shift. They will pace 21 paces on “the mat” turn to
the north at attention for 21 seconds, and return 21 paces back, facing the
tomb at each turn and counting the 21 seconds of tribute. They march even when the cemetery itself is
closed (as it is this weekend).
The way these vigilant
soldiers guard the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is a metaphor for how all of us
must guard this nation and the best it stands for: quietly, relentlessly,
unstintingly, lovingly.
Let’s keep the faith
because, “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.”
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