The tour buses don't take you to Section 60. You have to find it yourself and walk there.
The steady streams of visitors that surround Arlington National Cemetery's famed attractions, like the Tomb of the Unknowns and the Kennedy graves, aren't there.
In late afternoon the Sunday before last, there were just five or six people paying their respects at the graves in Section 60.
A Cadillac with a Michigan license plate pulls up and two middle-aged women and a teenage girl get out and search for a grave.
A 30-something man in a lawn chair keeps a vigil in front of a grave. Finally, he stands, salutes, folds his chair, takes one more look and turns to leave.
Sometimes, there is no one at all in Section 60 on this sunny summer afternoon.
Section 60 is where the dead from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are buried at Arlington National Cemetery. More than 300 of the 4,000-plus Americans who have died in those wars are there.
The cemetery is a somber place. But its harsher edges are often softened by decades and distance. Time absorbs, if not dissolves, the once-raw immediate emotions.
But Section 60 is different. It is current. It is right now. The numbers say it is. The names say so.
The birth dates on the traditional, simple, white stones in Section 60 are often from the 1980s. The first names are of that generation too -- names like Blake, Brandon, Justin, Megan and Ashley.
In contrast to the precise military orderliness of the rest of Arlington, where graves are simple and unadorned except for flowers, very personal tributes mark many of the stones in Section 60.
The lipstick remnants of a kiss still show on one grave marker. Another stone has a Coors Light bottle and a pack of Camel cigarettes lying in front of it.
Pictures of wives and children, cards, baubles and messages rest on top of or near many other graves.
One pregnant young wife bares her grief to the world in the note she attached to her husband's tombstone.
"People tell me God had something greater planned for you. But I can't imagine what could be more important than being the greatest daddy in the world to our girls," she wrote to him.
Often, it seems the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are out of sight and out of mind for most people.
Military personnel are applauded when they're introduced at a major league baseball game. ROTC students get extra cheers from some at college graduations. Maybe there is a yellow ribbon. But then it all quickly fades into the background.
Whether you think the war in Iraq was a good idea or a tragedy, whatever you think of George W. Bush, those who fight and those who die deserve an awareness of the depth of their sacrifice, their pain and their loss from their fellow Americans.
Section 60 tells you that. Section 60 tells you of the enormity of it without speaking a word.
If anyone can walk through Section 60 and still relegate the thought of those in the military to some far, forgotten corner of their mind, their heart is colder than any stone on any grave in Arlington.
-- Jim Naveau, June 2008
