Memorial Day at the Anzio War Cemetery

Clouds arrayed like an army on parade filled my vision and the sun shone through to warm my shoulders as a military band erupted into a melody of horns paced for marching. It was the American Memorial Day, but the commemoration was being held a few miles from Rome.

Although new to me, I realized that the scene was being played out around the world, as it had for many years. With the United States acting as a military partner with (and often protector of) people in far-flung places for many decades, our armed forces were deployed to many countries. After battles came cemeteries, scattered across the globe. I balanced ambivalent views about that, but not about my country’s — or my father’s — service in the war that took place on this ground.

On our second trip to Anzio, once again I found myself walking the grounds of the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and Memorial. The green acreage stitched with white crosses had been my first stop on that initial Italy trip, when I knew so little about my father’s war. Returning to walk his battlefields, I was beginning the task by taking part in a ritual of group remembering.

The Sicily-Rome American Cemetery and Memorial

I turned my attention to the ceremony, where soldiers of two countries in their sharp and shiny dress uniforms had gathered to pay their respects. Three of my father’s descendants would represent him for the day. My older brother Steve, along with his wife Anne, and my younger sister Karen, with husband Jeff, joined Susie and I to parade in with a stream of civilian guests, crunching down the wide gravel path that lined the reflecting pool in front of the cemetery’s verdant grounds.

We gathered before the marble memorial building, white-columned and solemn. During that holiday weekend, we had hiked up Monte la Difensa, we had dined with a group of Force veterans and descendants, and we had toured the hillside towns on the fringes of Mussolini’s grand experiment. Standing on the former marshland, memorial flags rippling in the spring breeze, the consequences of the war seemed momentous.

The pool mirrored the sky, a blue portal connecting the earth with the heavens.

Shoulder to shoulder with Italians and our extended Force family, we walked in step along the precision-cut edges of the path, manicured lawns fanning out with lines of crosses. Were there locals among us who remembered the upheaval that battered its way to their doorstep? Were the elderly soldiers in our group reliving their moments of service?

I gazed across the grounds, considering the place where our ancestors had marched to defend freedom from oppression and aggression and defy the visions that fevered into the heads of dictators.

An Italian honor guard ushered us into an area set for family of American servicemen and, walking past a line of locals, I felt myself to be a symbol, on display as an embodiment of the service that had been delivered by my father and his compadres. I sensed curious, considerate appraisal as we took our places, as though others were envisaging my connection, wondering whether their family members somehow had contact with my father. I looked at everyone that way as well. The citizens of Lazio, to me, symbolized an unconsidered aspect of war, where everyday people struggled to survive in the madness between dueling armies. In that respect we all shared one purpose: a personal connection to the blood and anguish that had taken place here seven decades previous.

This landscape was populated with the ghosts of those connections, the untold stories of survival and procreation. We stood as the hopes and destinies that were made possible by the triumph of the Allies on this future memorial, this former battlefield.

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Today is Bob Hope’s birthday. The entertainer was born in 1903 and died two days after his 100th birthday. He was known for entertaining US troops serving overseas through the USO. Here’s a six-minute documentary on that work.