Memorial Day

It's in poor repair, the government says, which is not surprising, given its age. It was built in 1907 just outside Hot Springs, SD, for the specific purpose of treating our veterans, many of whom, back then, could sit around a coffee table and spin yarns of Shiloh, Gettysburg, and Lookout Mountain.

I drove in early one summer morning several years ago, in awe at the massive, ornate architecture, so unlike anything built today. I didn't know the place was there, but just up from the old hospital is a national cemetery home to what remains of hundreds of vets who died here after years of residence at this storied old hospital. 

I've been in national cemeteries before, a World War II military graveyard in Belgium where acres and acres of perfectly manicured lawns create an emerald carpet for  thousands of white stones marching in hushed silence all around. The graveyard at the Battle Mountain Veterans Hospital is nowhere near as immense, but just as thoroughly stunning. 

I've been to  Gettysburg, to Vicksburg,  Lookout Mountain, twice to Chickamauga. Battlefield parks are moving, but one warm summer morning in August, alone in the hilly cemetery behind old Battle Mountain Hospital, just me and a couple hundred Civil War dead, was a moment I'd never forgotten--no artillery, no statues with swashbuckling officers wielding swords, no towering monuments. 

Just small graves in perfect order whose faces wouldn't let me forget that an entire regiment was just as certainly here too, men who'd long ago seen death first hand in fields all over the South, then, years later, had come here to die too, often alone. 

I'd gone out early to shoot some pictures of the buffalo herd at Wind Cave National Park, just up the road. I was lucky, caught them when they were all around me. I'd done well. It was still early, so on my way back to the motel, I stopped at a veterans hospital I hadn't even known was there, found the cemetery out back, the dead in rows up and down the hills. 

This Memorial Day that memory was in me when I got up, the cemetery at Battle Mountain, the men who died there, not on the battlefield at all, except the one many of them, if not all of them had likely never left. 

That's what I was thinking about this Memorial Day morning and that's my morning thanks.