Memorial Day, Dorset, Vermont - Brief Article

Commonweal, May 18, 2001 by Susanne Washburn

One day a year, in our Vermont village, you can put your hand on the heart of America. Nestled in the spring green of the Taconic range, Dorset turns out proudly every Memorial Day to salute those who went away to war from this bucolic place and never came back.

At 1 p.m. sharp, the service begins inside the marble United Church of Dorset and East Rupert, just beyond the village green. There is organ music, a color guard, and a dwindling contingent of veterans of several wars, some still trim enough to wear their old uniforms. The small church is well filled. Congregational singing intersperses prayers, a recitation of "In Flanders Fields," Lincoln's words at Gettysburg, and a speaker's address. Last year the soloist performed the haunting words and music of "Tenting Tonight," an 1860s war lament sung on both sides of the enemy line. The martial beat of "Onward, Christian Soldiers" (a hymn I stopped singing decades ago) concludes the service.

When the color guard retires, it leads a parade from the church, past the oval green, onto Route 30 where a state trooper stops traffic for the duration. Behind the color guard comes a flag-festooned convertible carrying three elderly veterans. The Burr and Burton Academy band, crisp in summer whites accented with mountain green, contributes brass, drums, and horns. Dorset's red-and-white LaFrance pumper is a high-profile participant. Some children have created a float; others ride trikes, flying clusters of small flags. Townspeople and guests in sportswear fall in behind.

The parade makes the short trek to Maple Hill Cemetery, up a slight incline and down into a hollow to gather near the war monument for the invocation. The band plays, then a wreath is laid. In response to shouted commands, four veterans fire the traditional three rifle volleys. Finally, two young buglers, standing apart, blow "Taps," the second horn repeating the first's musical phrase, each echoing again from the mountain backdrop. The parade returns to the green, where the flag is retired ceremoniously after "The Star-Spangled Banner." Formalities completed, it's on to the town picnic.

This national holiday springs from the graces of women of the South who decorated graves of both Union and Confederate dead. In Dorset the tradition began soon after the Civil War. An 1898 photo at the historical society shows a large group of people, all in hats, wearing suits and full-length dresses in front of a barn broadsided with a huge American flag. Parade-goers today still relish the celebration and visitors return from afar for another draft of pure Americana. I too am drawn back every year. Along with the color, pageantry, and country charm, it is the church service that touches me most.

The diminishing veterans' group puts a great deal of effort into the memorial. Thanks to one man's research, the full list of the dead was first read a few years ago. By far the largest group belongs to the Civil War--thirty-five from a town of, then as now, about two thousand. As wars (and medicine) proceed, the death toll declines: five in World War I, seven in World War II, two in Korea, three in Vietnam. After more research, the location and cause of death were added to each name. We hear Andersonville, the notorious Civil War prison, attached to three who died there--of disease; also Savage Station, Gettysburg, Wilderness. Five members of the Grand Army of the Republic succumbed to wounds; one, sent home ill to Dorset, died a few days after the end of the war. Decades after, there were more deaths--at the Hindenburg Line, the Battle of the Bulge, Leyte, Bien Hoa--place names of history, grim in recollection.

Memories of war are both terrible and complicated, as last month's revelations surrounding Senator Bob Kerrey in Vietnam remind us. Dorset has been fortunate in its thoughtful Memorial Day speakers who do not skirt the issues. One broached the tensions between the military and war protesters over Vietnam. Another examined Bosnia as a place that seeded many wars. A former Green Beret in Vietnam recalled the full realization of his responsibility for the lives of a platoon of men--all younger than he was--as a twenty-three-year-old first lieutenant.

Locating myself philosophically somewhere inside pacifism, I have occasionally wondered what brings me back every year to this church service. Is it because, as a toddler just before World War II, I learned to sing "When the Caissons Go Rolling Along" with my father, a farrier in the horse-drawn field artillery of World War I? I muse about these internal cross-pulls.

I am here, I've decided, because we honor these veterans for the trauma-- physical and emotional--that they all endured, wherever they were, whenever it was. What else can be said of the fire test of war? A human ordeal far beyond anything most of us have known. To those of Dorset (and to all the others), to those who didn't come home and those who did, we owe this bucolic town, this blessed land--and our efforts to make it worthy of their sacrifices.