I had never witnessed the Changing of the Guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier before my recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery.
I was not prepared for how moving it would be.
The precision of the soldiers’ movements, the silence of the crowd and the meaning of the place itself combined to make the ceremony one of the most powerful experiences of my visit to Washington, D.C.
The soldiers of the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as “The Old Guard,” maintain a vigil at the tomb 24 hours a day.
Watching the ceremony , you are struck by the discipline required of the soldiers. But you are also reminded of whom they are guarding: unidentified American service members who died in defense of their country.
In that setting, the Unknowns seem to represent all of the men and women who served, along with the families who waited for them to come home — and especially those whose loved ones never did.
That would have been powerful under any circumstances. For me, it carried some additional meaning because of the people with whom I shared it.
I traveled to Washington, D.C., to visit my oldest son, Ronnie, a second lieutenant in the Arkansas National Guard who has been assigned to Washington since July. His wife, Christi, and my grandson Liam flew in from North Little Rock, making the trip a brief family reunion as well as my first real opportunity to experience the nation’s capital.
I arrived late Thursday morning and departed early Sunday, so we packed quite a bit into a short visit.
Along with Arlington National Cemetery, we visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, the National Archives and the National Museum of the American Indian. We also visited the Marine Corps War Memorial, the monument inspired by the famous photograph of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima.
That stop had special meaning for our family.
Before joining the National Guard, Ronnie served in the Marine Corps Reserve. My grandfather, Benjamin Ray Loftis, was a Marine during World War II. Family lore holds that he was at Iwo Jima.
I cannot independently verify that part of the family story, but I thought about him as we stood before that enormous monument.
I thought about how young those Marines were and how far removed their experiences were from anything most of us can imagine today.
I also thought about Ronnie and the path that took him from the Marine Corps Reserve to the Arkansas National Guard and now, at least temporarily, to Washington.
Ronnie, whose full-time job is as a police detective, does not particularly like being recognized as either military or law enforcement.
He is not ashamed of either role; he simply does not enjoy the attention.
Unfortunately for him, he apparently looks exactly like someone who has served in the military. At the rental-car counter, a woman took one look at him and asked if he was a Marine.
She was right.
As a father, it is difficult to describe the feeling of visiting your grown son in the nation’s capital because his military service has taken him there. There is pride, of course, but there is also the realization that the little boy you raised now has a life, a career and responsibilities entirely his own.
Then you look over and see his son beside him, and suddenly three generations of your family seem connected to the generations represented by the monuments and memorials around you.
Washington is a city built around history.
Some of it is preserved in display cases at the Smithsonian. Some of it is kept in the National Archives. Some of it is carved into monuments.
And some of it is personal.
We traveled primarily on Washington’s Metrorail system, which proved to be a convenient way to get around once a visitor from Carroll County figured out where he was going.
Convenient, however, does not mean effortless.
I walked seven miles Saturday, which is more than I generally travel in a week without the assistance of my Toyota Tacoma — a Japanese truck, I should note, in a column that also mentions Iwo Jima. History takes some strange turns.
By the end of the day, I was tired. My feet hurt.
I had seen a great deal, but I knew we had barely scratched the surface of what Washington has to offer.
Still, when I think back on the trip, it will not be the miles of walking or even the museums that I remember first.
It will be the quiet at Arlington.
It will be the measured steps of a soldier guarding people whose names we do not know.
And it will be standing there with my son, my daughter-in-law and my grandson, watching a ceremony that says something important about sacrifice, service and remembrance without needing many words at all.
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Scott Loftis is editor and publisher of the Eureka Springs Times-Echo.
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