In March 1949, nearly six years to the day after he was killed in combat in Tunisia in World War II, my great-uncle Dick Halvey’s body was finally shipped back to the United States. His remains (“skeletonized,” the records say, and covered in a shroud) arrived in New York harbor with 66 other coffins, his name a typewritten pause between Grover, Willie B., and Hamilton, Billee L. From there the caskets were driven to Rosslyn, Virginia, in a mortuary car. Dick Halvey would be buried in Arlington National Cemetery in section 34, lot 2162, under the Latin Cross. A few inches of column in the Philadelphia Inquirer announced that Halvey’s rites would be conducted on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, at 2 p.m. The notice mentioned that Halvey had played on his high school varsity basketball team and had worked as a manager of the shipping department at Stadham & Co., in Philadelphia.
Unlike earlier obituaries, which had only mentioned the names of Dick’s father, Brendan, and brother, Robert, this one records my grandmother’s name, too. “A sister, Patricia,” it reads. It also contains an error, one many of his obituaries reproduced: “At the time of his death he was 24.” But Dick Halvey hadn’t yet turned 24 when he was killed in Tunisia; his birthday was still four months away. He was born the week a heat wave broke at the height of summer in 1919, a third blue-eyed Halvey baby, dressed in white pinafores and smiling with full cheeks.
Saved in the scrapbook my grandmother made to preserve Dick’s memory is a map of Arlington, a cartoonish rendering of the cemetery’s expanse. The route to Dick’s grave is traced in red pencil, a winding line that ends in one hasty X.
Like many mourners before and after him, Brendan Halvey found solace in the idea that his son had died for a reason. In 1943, he wrote in a letter that he believed that Dick had “accomplished his earthly mission” and called the war “this great cause.” He was “mighty proud” of his boys.
The Gettysburg Address ends with a promise: “—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” I think that this is what scares us, the public on whose behalf American wars are fought, what moves us to build polished statues heavy with patriotic symbolism and idealistic poetry. We are terrified that all those shortened lives were brought to an end for no reason at all. We want to imagine that soldiers and sailors die in glorious charges—that they greeted death because they chose to. We picture the cavalry in a medieval tapestry: knights weighed down with bright armor, swords that glister in falling sunlight, screams and drums and flapping pennants. This impulse to romanticize has only become stronger in the wake of our 21st-century “forever” wars, where open-ended conflicts rage on for murky reasons. At least individual death can be unquestionably heroic, sacrifice without qualification. War is almost always gruesome and wasteful, ugly and unfair, but it was once slower and closer, a way of killing and dying that the world wars brought definitively and irrevocably to an end.