On Memorial Day I went to the American Cemetery on former Clark Air Base in the Philippines. It was the worst day to go. It was crowded with tourists and there were events scheduled. It was also very hot. I paid my respects and left.
All I had in mind was a quiet visit like the one depicted in the opening and closing scenes of the movie Saving Private Ryan, filmed at the American cemetery at Normandy, to walk among the headstones - not searching for a particular name. All I really noticed during my short stay at Clark was that so many of the names on the simple headstones were of Filipinos who had fought the Japanese alongside Americans in WW2. But there were many American names, so many that it made me wonder. I don’t think most of the Americans who died here and were buried in that cemetery would've wanted to be buried there. I know all about the logistical impossibilities in 1944-45 of transporting the thousands of American dead home from all over the Pacific (dead sailors were accorded the traditional burial at sea). They were surrounded by brothers when they perished in combat and they're surrounded by brothers in death. But the loneliness of the cemetery, so very far from home, struck me.
Did you know that when the French evacuated Vietnam in 1954, after a century of French colonization, they dug up their dead - every dead Frenchman - from all of their cemeteries and carried them home to France? There must've been more dead Frenchmen than live ones by 1954. Every day I see many retired Americans here, walking the streets of this hot city, many of them military veterans. They came all this way to die, like it's a vast elephant graveyard, because of some nostalgia for their days in service. As Auden defined it so beautifully,
though one cannot always
Remember exactly why one has been happy,
There is no forgetting that one was.
And they will be buried in the American cemetery on Clark, that is still accepting "qualified" dead bodies. On the brink of my finally leaving here, I cannot imagine anything sadder or lonelier than being buried in a defunct US air base in a former US colony. The cemetery on Clark made me think of the beautiful Robert Frost poem, "In a Disused Graveyard":
In a Disused Graveyard
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
‘The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
