Oct 19 2011 Arlington Cemetery: the american way of death

• Arlington

  https://www.viajesalpasado.com/wp-content/uploads/Arlington.jpg

  People have ways of living and, also, to die. Just shop around for their cemeteries. The Arlington is very revealing of the American soul, always proud of their patriotism and their heroes. Names 300.000 Fallen, orphans stories, bewilder the visitor. But its headstones are aligned with neatly cut lawns millimeter, in the shade of trees and with negligible views. Death can also be comfortable. Es el american way of death.

• Arlington (1)

  https://www.viajesalpasado.com/wp-content/uploads/Arlington-1.jpg

  People have ways of living and, also, to die. Just shop around for their cemeteries. The Arlington is very revealing of the American soul, always proud of their patriotism and their heroes. Names 300.000 Fallen, orphans stories, bewilder the visitor. But its headstones are aligned with neatly cut lawns millimeter, in the shade of trees and with negligible views. Death can also be comfortable. Es el american way of death.

• Arlington (3)

  https://www.viajesalpasado.com/wp-content/uploads/Arlington-3.jpg

  People have ways of living and, also, to die. Just shop around for their cemeteries. The Arlington is very revealing of the American soul, always proud of their patriotism and their heroes. Names 300.000 Fallen, orphans stories, bewilder the visitor. But its headstones are aligned with neatly cut lawns millimeter, in the shade of trees and with negligible views. Death can also be comfortable. Es el american way of death.

• Arlington (4)

  https://www.viajesalpasado.com/wp-content/uploads/Arlington-4.jpg

  People have ways of living and, also, to die. Just shop around for their cemeteries. The Arlington is very revealing of the American soul, always proud of their patriotism and their heroes. Names 300.000 Fallen, orphans stories, bewilder the visitor. But its headstones are aligned with neatly cut lawns millimeter, in the shade of trees and with negligible views. Death can also be comfortable. Es el american way of death.

• Arlington (5)

  https://www.viajesalpasado.com/wp-content/uploads/Arlington-5.jpg

  People have ways of living and, also, to die. Just shop around for their cemeteries. The Arlington is very revealing of the American soul, always proud of their patriotism and their heroes. Names 300.000 Fallen, orphans stories, bewilder the visitor. But its headstones are aligned with neatly cut lawns millimeter, in the shade of trees and with negligible views. Death can also be comfortable. Es el american way of death.

• Arlington portada

  https://www.viajesalpasado.com/wp-content/uploads/Arlington-portada.jpg

  People have ways of living and, also, to die. Just shop around for their cemeteries. The Arlington is very revealing of the American soul, always proud of their patriotism and their heroes. Names 300.000 Fallen, orphans stories, bewilder the visitor. But its headstones are aligned with neatly cut lawns millimeter, in the shade of trees and with negligible views. Death can also be comfortable. Es el american way of death.

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People have ways of living and, also, to die. Just shop around for their cemeteries. The Arlington is very revealing of the American soul, always proud of their patriotism and their heroes. Names 300.000 Fallen, orphans stories, bewilder the visitor. But its headstones are aligned with neatly cut lawns millimeter, in the shade of trees and with negligible views. Death can also be comfortable. Es el american way of death.

Arlington is one of those places that, before setting foot in them, and you have cast hundreds of times in your living room through TV. Seeing their training grasslands graves, many discovered that there was another way to bury the dead, more peaceful and less gloomy, niches that our cemeteries depressing and sumptuous pantheons committed to distance even in death, we all matches.

He had seen their rows of tombstones mapped to string on fresh grass, the simplicity of the gospel, "In green pastures make me rest", in one word. Therefore, in my fleeting visit Washington had more interest in closer to Arlington than walk along the Capitol.
In recent months, Arlington, perhaps the world's most famous cemetery, has entered the fray for a reason unsuspected: the unusual botched its operators to correctly identify some of their "guests". It follows that U.S. Senate investigation has uncovered that 6.000 bodies are incorrectly identified (until now it was thought that only just over 200 were anonymous). War veterans put their outcry. Such an affront to the memory of the dead in a country, already pointed, proud of their fallen, swept away to the senior management of the cemetery, led John Metzler, who had been in office nearly twenty years. The so Metzler had not made the leap into the digital age and the files were still carried exclusively on paper. Trying to bring order to a cemetery with a century and a half dead with notebooks behind grid was asking too much.

I feel like I've been sneaking a few minutes left in the frame of one of those war movies where the heroes always ended with the solemn funeral at Arlington

Walking through the neat paths along the cemetery wriggling among the sea of ​​tombs, leaving behind tombstones with stories that never meet, I diluted in the immensity of anonymous lives, like mine, as yours, that sooner or later will follow the same path to oblivion. A slap of fatalism, we. I feel like I've been sneaking a few minutes left in the frame of one of those war movies where the heroes always ended with the solemn funeral at Arlington. I wonder, in view of such grave motley, if there is enough land to accommodate more dead. Sergio, our guide, wishes him a few more years of life (how strange it sounds to hear about life surrounded by so much death).

Although leads 14 years living in the United States, Sergio still pining her beloved Chilean soil. And therefore you wake the dead soldier antiwar speech.
-I do not want my children going to die in a war that neither us or we will come…- whisper as if he feared missing al the respect that both hero, perhaps, life also left thousands of miles from home in a race that could care less.

Natural Patagonia Punta Arenas, it illuminates the face when I tell you that last year we were in Patagonia. Then he sprouts a Chilean accent muted so far and his smile crackles as if at the feet of the very Torres del Paine. Even recites Neruda longingly, resounding verses that color for a few seconds of vitality the cemetery.

Among the many thousands of burials, only a few are saved from the anonymity of ordinary men. John, Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy ranks first all eyes. What a bummer not being able to have some privacy or even dead. The brother of the first two, Ted, also buried in the same place since August 2009. But in its simplicity, certainly the most pageantry marriage is off Kennedy, located at the foot of a hill of greenery insulting, crowned by Arlington House, the memorial erected in memory of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, whom the U.S. government had to pay 150.000 U.S. dollars, completed and civil war, to stay with the 624 acres of the cemetery, double that of Central Park. There was not enough room to bury many soldiers.

There comes to mind the blunt and laconic phrase of the great Ionesco. The history of mankind can be written in a cigarette paper, said: "They were born, suffered and died "

Frenta his grave like an eternal flame which honors the Unknown Soldier in Paris, Jacky's whim, America's widow. An iron chain prevents closer. A few meters, are sculpted a handful of grandiloquent phrases Lennon, Ghandi and other notables who died imagining a better world, including their own Kennedy (the famous "Think not what America can do for you, but what you can do for America ", including). The granite stones surrounding the grave also carry a symbolic: come from the Kennedy family residence in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and were selected one by one by the most famous clan members of U.S. policy.

I say goodbye to Arlington walking alone by one of his neat trails, reading the names of some of the young soldiers killed, each with their stories of hopes and disappointments in tow, unfortunately anonymous. They left before start living. There comes to mind the blunt and laconic phrase of the great Ionesco. The history of mankind can be written in a cigarette paper, said: "They were born, suffered and died ". A more accurate epitaph for many of these heroes that are just as comfortable subtract the scenery of this death fraught with honors and respect, el peculiar american way of death.

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If you want to complete this journey through the memory of the heroes of the United States is interesting to see the statue closer to paying tribute to the Marines, represented by five soldiers raising the flag of the stars and stripes in the Suribachi rises, in Iwo Jima, one of the undoubted icons of patriotic symbolism of this country.

Addition, the memorial in memory of those killed in the Vietnam War painful, junto al National Mall, overwhelmed with thousands of casualties recorded in an endless wall, La Pared del Vietnam, admiration perpetuating some compatriots who gave their lives in the most painful defeat of U.S. military history.
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