The flag draped coffin

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I attended a military funeral. Perhaps I should attribute the fact that I have never witnessed such an affair in the past to good fortune. Or perhaps I have led too sheltered a life. In any case, it was a novel experience for me, and it provoked a thought or two.

There were no horse-drawn caissons or twenty-one gun salutes at this funeral. I didn't miss them, because I was still impressed. There was a uniformed bugler who played "Taps" and draped over the coffin, there was a United States flag, which two young men, in blue dress uniforms with yellow striped trousers and white gloves, ceremoniously folded and presented to the widow. I watched these two soldiers as they slowly performed this ceremony. They had obviously spent hours drilling and rehearsing it, perhaps separately or perhaps as a team.

As I watched these young men, I could not help wondering what was going through their minds as they folded and smoothed that flag, first into one crisp rectangle after another, then into one crisp triangle after another. Perhaps they were thinking of the cars or televised athletic events or young women with whom they would have preferred to spend the day. Perhaps they were thinking of the various tickles and itches they were suffering but which military protocol forbade them to scratch. Perhaps they were thinking about how much more comfortable they might have been at the beach. Or perhaps they were worried about dropping the flag or otherwise "messing up" in such a way as to embarrass themselves in front of the grieving family or to dishonor the man in the box.

Most of all, I wondered how much they thought they had in common with that man. I wondered whether they considered and what they thought of all which this man's life had contained. Did it give them pause to observe the fact that the widow he left, and to whom they presented the flag, was old enough to be their grandmother? We hear news every day about the number of American soldiers killed in Baghdad. I wondered how many times these young soldiers had buried their own contemporaries. Had they ever before folded a flag which had draped a coffin holding an eighty-seven-year-old body?

To my best friend, it was simply her own Daddy inside that box. To me, it was a person whose life at its end was nothing anyone could have imagined at its beginning. How could his mother, when she gave birth to him, have known that it would be the flag of the United States which would some day cover his coffin? For the first sixteen years of his life, he lived in Germany. But that was not a good place  for a Jew who hoped to live a long life. So as a sixteen-year-old boy, he managed to escape the country where he was born and he came to the United States.

Most Jews born in Europe in 1920 did not have that good fortune. Most did not fight in World War II under the flag of the United States of America. Most, if they suffered wounds during that war, did not received Purple Heart medals for their troubles. Most did not live long and fulfilling lives in a land far across the sea from the lands of their birth. And most, when they died, did not have well-attended funerals. Most did not have grandchildren to deliver their eulogies. Most did not have well-marked graves. Most did not have a bugler there to play "Taps" as their families and friends, gathered together, laid them to rest. And most did not have pairs of young American soldiers there, folding American flags for their widows, white gloves and all.