It is clearly visible from the train just east of the Norfolk Southern tracks: Culpeper National Military Cemetery, Culpeper, Virginia. You can walk there from the station. As a final resting place for members of America’s military who died in or were native to this vicinity, it is one of 137 such official burying grounds. It is hardly famous, certainly not in the same league as Arlington National Cemetery with its “eternal flame” across the Potomac from Washington D.C. or Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial on its majestic bluff overlooking Omaha Beach and the English Channel. But it will do.

The earliest graves in Culpeper date from the Civil War era and burials are still taking place. Far from everyone resting here actually fought, but all served. Charles W. Fortune, Jr., Specialist Fourth Class United States Army, was born in 1943, served in Vietnam and died in 2003. He lies in plot number 306 in, section O, the grave on the northwest corner.

Not so long ago Memorial Day was commonly called Decoration Day. In that tradition this Memorial Day, Culpeper National Cemetery will burst forth with little American flags, their red and blue accenting the predominant white of the grave stones and the green grass that enfolds them. Then, for most of the year (for this is the temperate South), the scene will revert to green-and-white.

The Culpeper National Military Cemetery, Culpeper, Virginia. Photo: Timothy Jacobson

The resemblance surely has been remarked before: the likeness of ordered rows of identical grave markers to, in life, rows of marching men. Thousands will remember from experience, or the movies, the drill sergeant shouting to the raw recruit: “You’re in the army now, mister; you don’t matter anymore, nothing about you matters, mister; you’re part of a unit and all that matters is the mission, mister. Don’t forget it, mister. Not that I’m ever going to let you, mister!” He might have added, “And you’ll get nothing special on your tombstone either, mister.”

Here in Culpeper lie a few heroes and, no doubt, a good many less-than-heroes too. Volunteers and draftees rest together, peacetime soldiers beside true warriors whom fortune favored with hot wars to fight. They fought those wars, we like to say, for the cause of freedom, and so they did. They also fought them (which takes nothing away) for the fellow-grunt in the next trench.

Charles Fortune, in number 306, served in Vietnam, that conflicted conflict from which so much subsequent cultural collapse seemed to spawn. Fortune in this sense did not favor Charles Fortune. He didn’t get a shot at Omaha Beach, like his father might have done, beating back ultimate evil. His battleground was some little piece of steamy Asian jungle, where the good guys did not win. But here in Culpeper none of that matters any more.

Politics, as we liked to say in less rancorous times, stop at the water’s edge. They still do, at the cemetery gate. In the first lines of his famous ode to the Confederate dead, Allen Tate (who here was our Lawrence Binyon and John McCrae rolled into one), captures the transcendent mood, no matter the detail that no Confederates rest here: “Row after row with strict impunity / The headstones yield their names to the elements.”

In Culpeper, the elements still have much work to do. Our national cemeteries are meticulously well-maintained, and rules abound: no littering, don’t harm the trees, no jogging or cycling, “no public gatherings of a partisan nature, no demeaning activity or boisterous action.” But time will triumph, and because the government-issue stones are dignified marble and not “Rock-of-Ages” granite, the elements will one day have their way. Charles Fortune’s stone, like his body beneath it, will return to dust.

Until then however there will be a good many more Decoration Day opportunities to pay respects at such places, with or without a book of poetry at hand. When you do, let the long undifferentiated rows of headstones work their spell. Here lies America’s everyman (and a few women). Here lie soldiers of vast citizen armies. Here lie friends and loved ones. Here lie not races, genders or ethnicities, but individuals with names. So, Charles W. Fortune, Jr., along with your neighbors in the next trench there in the corner of Section O—Evata Morris PFC United States Army World War II and Jimmie L. Tuel AIC United States Air Force Korea): rest well. Others have the watch.

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