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A Chance to Honor Our Best Ambassadors
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Contributor | ArmyDem |
Last Edited | ArmyDem May 24, 2006 11:22pm |
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Category | Commentary |
News Date | Tuesday, May 30, 2006 05:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
Description | We must do more to remember the dead American soldiers whose sacrifice forever binds us to Europe.
By Jonathan Keehner
Newsweek
May 29, 2006 issue - On an overcast morning at the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium, a few miles from the German border, David Atkinson gathered supplies for the day: a small American flag and pail of sand. As he worked, he explained that rubbing the sand on the headstone would make the inscription stand out in our photographs.
"We avoid clay or iron oxide in order to not stain the marble," said the 50-year-old superintendent with the fuzzy accent of someone used to conversing in four languages daily. Atkinson was addressing my father, my older brother and me. We had come to Belgium to visit my grandfather's graveāa first for his two grandsons. Henri-Chapelle is the resting place for 7,992 American World War II dead.
As we stood overlooking a gentle valley patch worked with farms, we felt far from the carnage that took place on that spot at the Battle of the Bulge in early 1945. Many of those buried at Henri-Chapelle perished while repulsing Germans in the Ardennes or advancing across the border. Atkinson was doing for us what he had done for countless others: preserving the memory of a relative who had never come home. As it turned out, his own father died serving the United States. His parents met during the first world war, and after his father's death he was raised in his mother's native Normandy, where, he recalled, he had played in abandoned German bunkers. |
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