What they gave

I'll wear this cap today, just because. It reminds me of some things.

It reminds me of a cigar shop in, yes, Gettysburg, Pa., and of a warm spring morning, and of everything that lies a stone's throw away up a gentle rise. There are trees and grass and shadowed walkways and graceful monuments there, and concentric circles of granite set flush with the earth. They radiate out from one of those monuments, a geometry of names from Vermont and Pennsylvania and New York and Ohio and Michigan, and, yes, Indiana.

This is the Gettysburg National Cemetery, just up the street from the cigar shop on East Cemetery Hill. There are 6,000 sons and husbands and fathers buried here, sleeping their eternal sleep. Some of them died in the Spanish-American War and World War I and World War II and many other wars, because that's what happens when human beings get it in their minds to kill, and other human beings are called upon to stop them.

Three-thousand, five-hundred twelve of them died in the Civil War, many of them meeting the last of their days on the slanting fields and rocky outcroppings that surround this place. Interspersed among the granite circles are small square stones bearing only numbers. These are the unknown dead, and there are almost 1,000 of them.

Known or unknown, buried here or elsewhere, they came here from 18 states, from Maine to Minnesota. And they died far from home. Their names were Strong Vincent and Patrick O'Rorke and Elon Farnsworth. Their names were Charles Hazlett and Stephen Weed and Alonzo Cushing, who was just 22 years old when a Confederate bullet hit him in the mouth and killed him in the last mad minutes before Pickett's Charge spent itself on Cemetery Ridge.

Today is about them, and all the others. Today is about the boys who never came back, about Cushing and Vincent and O'Rorke and Pvt. Charles Baker of the 1st Minnesota -- a farmer from Barnesville, Mn., who died as twilight came down on July 2, and the 1st Minnesota was sent on a suicide mission to buy time against an irresistible Confederate assault.

We talk a lot about sacrifice, on Memorial Day. It is the central theme of a day given over to cookouts and relaxing and welcoming the summer to come. And it is perhaps never more central than it is now, when the contrast between what sacrifice is and what it isn't has never been more glaring.

What it is, we can find up that gentle rise in Gettysburg. What it isn't is what we're being asked to do now in the face of the Bastard Plague.

We are being asked to wear a mask when we go to the grocery store.

We are being asked to forego for a time, some of the pleasures of American life.

We are being asked to help stem the tide of a vicious illness that, in less than three months, has already claimed 14 times more lives than were lost on those fields and outcroppings in the first days of July 1863.

And how have some of us reacted to that?

By yowling like spoiled children who've been denied a cookie.

By missing the splendid irony of hollering about "tyranny" and "freedom" while freely staging armed occupations of statehouses.

By harassing, and at times physically attacking, beleaguered store employees who've requested they help out simply by wearing masks on the premises.

The freedom to act like idiots, as with all others, is an American right. But I hope Pvt. Charles Baker is doing triple Axels in his grave, seeing all this. I hope Alonzo Cushing and Elon Farnsworth are themselves yowling in the Great Beyond, wondering why the hell they took  a bullet for these dumb SOBs.

Or in Farnsworth's case, five bullets.

Let me tell you about Farnsworth.

He was a 25-year-old cavalry captain from Michigan when, late on the afternoon of July 3, he was ordered to lead an entirely unnecessary charge by his commanding officer, Judson Kilpatrick. The battle was over, the order made no sense, but Farnsworth obeyed it.

His troop promptly rode into a thicket of Confederate riflemen who hadn't yet withdrawn from their position on the extreme left of the Union line. The boys in gray could hardly miss. Farnsworth was shot five times in the chest and died.

There's a modest monument there now, marking the spot. The last time I was in Gettysburg, I tracked it down. Its very remoteness from the rest of the battlefield speaks to how ridiculous was Kilpatrick's order. There wasn't another soul in sight as I stood in the middle of the clearing where Farnsworth died, and looked around, and thought about how this was last thing in his earthly life he saw.

I think about that now, as I wear this cap. I think about how and why he and all the others died on that day, and on the two previous.

And then I wonder if we deserve it.