The vanished, and the cost

Always I remember the cemeteries, on this day when we pause to honor the ones who never came back. They are in France, the cemeteries, and too much forgotten as their war is too much forgotten, in this time without history.

They are the American cemetery at Belleau Wood. They are the American cemetery at Meuse-Argonne. They are the American cemetery at St. Mihiel.

Rows of white crosses stretch away from you in these green gardens, arrayed in perfect and awful symmetry. American boys who sang "Over There" as they marched off to the Western Front slumber eternally there, killed by German machine guns or artillery or a horrifying flu pandemic in the last great push of World War I.

They were kids, most of them, from small towns and big cities and bucolic farms. Most of them had no clue what they were in for when they went marching off singing. Some of them never would know, killed before they'd barely seen anything.

One second they were filing into a trench complex built and then abandoned by the French or British; the next, oblivion. And then a name on a white cross in a green place far from home.

Or, not a cross. Because that happened, too.

I'm reminded of this because the other day, in honor of Memorial Day weekend, the Fort Wayne TinCaps unveiled a chair and a plaque at Parkview Field. Unlike the other chairs in the 'View, this one is not green, but black. And no one will ever sit in it.

The accompanying plaque explains: The black chair is symbolic of all the Americans who were either POWs or MIAs, and who not only never came home but simply vanished. According to the plaque, there have been 92,000 of those since the Great War.

And suddenly I'm right back in France, at a country crossroads on a sun-washed summer day, standing in the cool dimness of the marble memorial at the St. Mihiel American Cemetery. The cemetery, comprising more than 4,000 of those white crosses, lies in lush farmland just outside the village of Thiaucourt, in the middle of the old St. Mihiel salient. In 1918, in their first large-scale action of the war, American military forces reduced the salient, at great cost.

Here inside the marble chamber, the cost hits home. On one wall is an immense plaque of polished black stone, stretching almost from floor to ceiling. On it, name upon name is etched in gold. They are the names of the American soldiers who simply disappeared from the earth during the St. Mihiel campaign.

The names go on forever, every one of them once a living soul with a family and a life and dreams of a future. Every one of them simply gone, from one battlefield of one war, so that other living souls could make their own families and lives and futures.

Something to think about this day. And all days.