I don’t get to Washington D.C. as much as I did when I was younger.
When I do, I stop in to see my father. Sometimes I bring a beer and sit down and catch him up on things. I tell him about his namesake grandson, my latest misadventures, and the current state of the republic.
The next trip is going to be the toughest; I must let him know that my mom and his beloved wife died in January. It’s a one-way conversation because it takes place at Grave 99, Section 3, in Arlington National Cemetery. Cmdr.
Peter Rodrick was lost in a plane crash off the USS Kitty Hawk in 1979. In my 20 or so visits, I’ve sat and talked with him and watched the business of burying the dead. Sometimes, there was a horse-drawn caisson carrying a flag-draped coffin of some teenage boy or girl killed in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Then the crisp, staccato sounds of soldiers firing off a 21-gun salute as an officer hands a flag from a grateful nation to a mom, a dad, a wife, a son, a daughter who will never feel whole again. I know that was true of my mother. One thing I’ve always noticed at Arlington is the silence — even little kids dragged there on summer vacations seem to understand the solemnity of the grounds.
The exception is Donald Trump . I was already pissed when I watched Trump on Monday turn a ceremony commemorating the third anniversary of the deaths of 13 soldiers at Abbey Gate during the harrowing evacuation of Afghanistan into a tawdry stunt. Trump was scoring cheap political points again.