But those who fell in great battles and in places with forgotten names are still on guard. If America’s leaders betray their solemn oaths, our fallen guardians will stir in their resting places, and from jungles and deserts and ocean deeps, from one end of the earth to the other, they will rise.
In the dawn of that future Memorial Day I will hear footfalls of my risen brothers in arms beneath my window. They will march on the city, and above them there will be whispers of more phantoms in parachutes. They will assemble in a great formation before the Capitol. Once again their bodies will be whole, their uniforms clean, and their worn rifles and sabers will be renewed.
That morning the living will muster with the dead. Around the ghosts wearing three-cornered hats and steel helmets, Americans from every town and city will come to give their voices to the silent legion. They will demand an accounting. They will demand a rebirth of the freedom and liberty for which their forefathers fought and died.
On that coming Memorial Day.