Memorial Day Div

My post from 2012 still applies  - - though they've now closed Walter Reeed and I'm no longer Driving4$$ (since they don't want to pay what they owe me, why work, eh ??).

Jim Wright has an excellent essay over at Stonekettle Station on the current VA mess. Jim is a veteran also and though sometimes he's a bit verbose, he's good. ..... and yes, Eric Shinseki deserves better treatment.

Last night, I listened to a reading of one of Walt Whitman's poems from 1865,  .... may our honored brothers in arms rest peacefully.

Pensive on Her Dead Gazing
Pensive on her dead gazing I heard the Mother of All,
Desperate on the torn bodies, on the forms covering the battlefields
gazing,
(As the last gun ceased, but the scent of the powder-smoke linger'd,)
As she call'd to her earth with mournful voice while she stalk'd,
Absorb them well O my earth, she cried, I charge you lose not my
sons, lose not an atom,
And you streams absorb them well, taking their dear blood,
And you local spots, and you airs that swim above lightly impalpable,
And all you essences of soil and growth, and you my rivers' depths,
And you mountain sides, and the woods where my dear children's
blood trickling redden'd,
And you trees down in your roots to bequeath to all future trees,
My dead absorb or South or North--my young men's bodies absorb,
and their precious precious blood,
Which holding in trust for me faithfully back again give me many a
year hence,
In unseen essence and odor of surface and grass, centuries hence,
In blowing airs from the fields back again give me my darlings, give
my immortal heroes,
Exhale me them centuries hence, breathe me their breath, let not an
atom be lost,
O years and graves! O air and soil! O my dead, an aroma sweet!
Exhale them perennial sweet death, years, centuries hence.