Monday, November 10, 2014

‘Section 60,’ at Arlington

Book review: ‘Section 60,’ at Arlington National Cemetery, by Robert M. Poole
November 7 2014 - There is as yet no national memorial to those who have fought in our three wars in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan, and the battles in other countries that have harbored combatants in what used to be called the “Global War on Terror” but now, like the current war in Iraq, has no name. How could there already be a memorial, with the outcome so deeply in doubt not just in Iraq and Afghanistan, but across a major swath of the globe?

And so the families and loved ones of those who have fallen in these wars have nowhere to express their grief and love and despair and hope, except at the grave sites of the 7,000 Americans who have been killed in the effort. Many of those graves rest in Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery, a 14-acre plot that, Robert M. Poole tells us in this lovely, heartfelt and haunting book, “will serve as a memorial for the recent wars, a point of contact for the community of the living and the community of the dead.”

Poole, a former executive editor of National Geographic, reports on a handful of the members of those two communities, united by something that happened far away from Arlington but that resulted in internment on sacred ground in Section 60. read more>>>


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