Memorial Day, small town Massachusetts

Europeans think that a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.

- Unknown

I live in the heart of bluest Blue State America, but this town has earned its place in the Nation's Honor Roll with the blood of its veterans. The town dates way, way back - to the Seventeenth Century, in fact. So do its veterans. Today, I want to show you just how much this town has to remember, and be proud of.

While Veteran's Day is for remembering the fallen veterans, most of these pictures are from the local town Burying Ground, of men who survived the war and returned to live out the rest of their days. However, for each who returned, there's another buried in soil far from hearth and home.

As far as I know, there are no honored dead from Iraq and Afghanistan. At least, I don't remember any news, and haven't seen any graves. But the War On Terror has not left the town unscathed.


Three of the town's citizens were on American Airlines flight 11 to San Francisco, that September 11 morning. That one hits pretty close to home, because that's the flight I used to take to The Coast, back when I worked for Big Tech Company.


Desert Storm is represented, not by a combat casualty, but by someone who died too young.


When I was young, the old soldiers were from World War I, and the young soldiers were going off to Vietnam. Now the Vietnam veterans have become old in turn.

Like most of these pictures, this was not a combat casualty. Like my Uncle Dick, this soldier returned to his family.


World War II makes up the second largest group of veterans in this cemetery. One couple were both veterans, he in the Army and she in the Navy. Now they lie side by side, each with a flag decorating their grave.


Grandpa was in the army during the World War, and Dad still has the flag that draped his coffin.


Cpl. Hunt was actually a combat casualty (or perhaps died of disease) in the Spanish-American War. He was brought home to lie under a War Department headstone.


The single largest group of decorations is for the men who fought in the Grand Army of the Republic. There sure are a lot of these.


I couldn't find any markers for the Mexican War. It seems that the Army was too small, and recruited from places far from here. But there are two men who fought in the War of 1812.


But Pride of Place is reserved for the Minutemen who marched to Concord. 58 flags mark the veterans of the Revolution, watched over by the town monument to them:


There were more than 58 on that day - several hundred in fact. Most moved away, or are buried somewhere else.

But they weren't the oldest veterans. A hundred years before the unpleasantness with His late Majesty George III, the town came within a hairs breadth of being wiped out by 800 Indian warriors under King Philip. Captain Wadsworth and 28 militia under his command fell to a man, but so thrashed the Indians that the town was saved.

This was the biggest combat loss in the town's history, and dates from 1676 when the frontier extended only a few miles to the west of here.

Three and a third centuries of men from this one town answered the call of Country - and in some cases, King. That's a tradition to be proud of. But not all who fall are returned to their families like Cpl. Hunt, or are buried among their families in the ground hallowed by their own valor. On this Memorial Day, remember all the fallen but especially those in lonely (or unmarked) graves, far from home.