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Post by fred on Jan 24, 2008 14:49:26 GMT -6
Quite honestly, that "unknown soldier" thing may be the crassest "memorial" ever erected. Anybody with half a brain-- or maybe a sense of propriety-- would have shipped whatever remains there were to the National Cemetery.
As for Medicine Tail Coulee, Melani, I too heard it was for sale when I was there with my friends in June. However, I am sitting here with a topo map from the Custer Battlefield Preservation Committee and I see that the Committee owns virtually all of MTC from where Cedar Coulee dumps into it, all the way down to the ford. The only piece along that route they are missing is a small area in the upper right hand corner of grid square 28 (if you have that topo map). That small chunk is about mid-way between the Cedar Coulee egress and where North Fork enters MTC. It measures only about 1/4-mile.
I had also heard the owner of Cedar Coulee was selling, but again the Preservation Committee owns the lower half. The coulee's beginning, just east of the access road, down to just a tad below Weir Peaks, is in private hands.
Another thing. I believe-- though I am not certain-- all that land is considered grazing land, which comes with a price tag considerably below land considered for other uses. I don't know how one would go about changing that if one were to buy the land-- if he even could. But high prices for useless, semi-contiguous, and "intrude-able" property, are seldom the building blocks financial dreams are made of.
Garryowen is a whole 'nother bird... why would anyone want it? I can see it going piecemeal... but to me, the real value is in the archives. The businesses themselves...?
Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by Melani on Jan 24, 2008 15:05:16 GMT -6
Well, I never said the memorial was great architecture! It certainly isn't what I would have done. But I don't think it was done with bad intentions, just lousy taste. The guy's been there since 1926, with one small trip to avoid becoming part of the road. It would certainly be appropriate to put him in the National Cemetery, but it's not the first thing on my priority list. The Feds aren't going to shell out for moving him, reburying him would probably require another Act of Congress or something (!), and there would certainly be some kind of huge local political hassle over it. Also, I keep thinking back to the fact that Godfrey was instrumental in the original ceremony, and after all--it was his battle, he was there and we weren't. So all things considered, I think the Unknown Soldier will probably rest a bit more peacefully for the moment if we leave him alone.
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Post by gocav76 on Jan 24, 2008 15:30:02 GMT -6
Fred, Perhaps I don't understand you. What would a former leader of a rigid "Soviet military system", who has now returned to his "Mother Russia," Vietnam--know about gravesites in Cuba?
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Post by fred on Jan 24, 2008 16:11:09 GMT -6
Melani--
You are probably correct. It is just that I have a problem reconciling the private ownership of the remains of a U. S. soldier killed in combat, interred in a mausoleum erected for palpably commercial reasons. I think if one was to discover the remains of a soldier, the U. S. government has some sort of mechanism in place for his proper interment. If I were to kick off today-- don't anyone get their hopes up!-- I could be buried in a National Cemetery. I think that would apply to this fellow, as well.
gocav76--
I was being facetious. Did Cao Ky return to Vietnam? Plus, Nguyen Cao Ky was a South Vietnamese and that military was hardly rigid. Actually, it was hardly military. My only point was, we left enough men behind there... as I said, facetious. Mother Russia, indeed! God!, there is just no getting through at times, is there? Tell me, Larry, why do some people have to take themselves so seriously at times? Can't there ever be a little chuckle/wiggle room?
Best wishes, Fred.
PS-- Larry, I hope you do not mind. I fixed the quote in your post. I hope the way it shows now is the way you intended it to be. FCW
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Post by markland on Jan 24, 2008 17:15:36 GMT -6
I find it unbelievable if not somewhat macabre that a soldier's mortal remains (somebody who has given the ultimate sacrifice) can be in private ownership! It may even be the remains of Kildare soldier - Corporal James Martin, G Co. - as the remains were found without a skull. Can the Government or the State not step in and purchase the property and contents on behalf of the American people? Maybe I should get the Irish Government involved...... Oh yes, see the thread on this board entitled Milk Creek. The remains of nine soldiers killed in that battle Sept. 29/30, 1879 were found in an unmarked grave at the site which is located on private land. The land's owner refuses to allow the government to mark or move the remains to a national cemetery. So far, of the nine, I have identified the country of origin as Ireland in four cases: Antrim, Cavan, Dublin and Roscommon. A fifth was from Manchester, England. Billy EDIT: The remains of I believe two soldiers were found at which point the discoverer stopped digging. I seem to recall that period papers stated that all the casualties had been buried in one mass grave.
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Post by fred on Jan 24, 2008 17:21:17 GMT -6
The land's owner refuses to allow the government to mark or move the remains to a national cemetery. My heavens! That's a disgrace. No soldier I ever knew was willing to die for the benefit of some private landowner. Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by gocav76 on Jan 24, 2008 17:21:29 GMT -6
Fred, This is what Wikipedia says about Ky "He made headlines in 2004 by being the first South Vietnamese leader to visit Vietnam since the war, a move that was seen as a shameful one by many Vietnamese-Americans. He returned there again in early 2005, this time accompanied by his current wife. They attended a formal reception given by Vietnam's leaders to representatives of overseas Vietnamese and announced his decision to move back to Vietnam to live permanently. Ky also declared he would try to help bring more investments to Vietnam." At first I thought you knew something about the way the Government in Vietnam has treated the cemeteries of the French military buried there. From what I have seen -those graves are not treated very well-nor graves of ARVN. I was just joking too about "Mother Russia' too. Thanks for fixing my post--I got those features to work once--now I can't remember how I did it. Larry
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Post by fred on Jan 24, 2008 17:31:28 GMT -6
Larry--
You bring up a very good point. I hadn't thought of the French graves, or the ARVN, for that matter. Both deserve to be treated as well as we would treat our own. I think the whole issue is a disgrace, from the "unknown soldier" at Garryowen (and "doyle1876" brings up a good point that it may have been James Martin from G Company) to the dead troopers Billy Markland referred to.
I don't mind Ky going back there (it clears our welfare rolls a bit)-- he was always something of an opportunist-- if he feels he needs to. It is his country, regardless of the political system, and he certainly has the right to return.
Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by markland on Jan 24, 2008 17:37:05 GMT -6
The land's owner refuses to allow the government to mark or move the remains to a national cemetery. My heavens! That's a disgrace. No soldier I ever knew was willing to die for the benefit of some private landowner. Best wishes, Fred. At the time, I believe it was either open range or on the boundary of the Paiute tribe's reservation. They don't have that land any longer. Billy
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Post by doyle1876 on Jan 24, 2008 17:37:27 GMT -6
It is just that I have a problem reconciling the private ownership of the remains of a U. S. soldier killed in combat, interred in a mausoleum erected for palpably commercial reasons. I think if one was to discover the remains of a soldier, the U. S. government has some sort of mechanism in place for his proper interment. If I were to kick off today-- don't anyone get their hopes up!-- I could be buried in a National Cemetery. I think that would apply to this fellow, as well.
My point exactly, Fred. Are you allowed in the state of Montana to sell/barter/purchase the remains and final resting place of a person, particularly military personal? As part of my work, I have supervised the exhumation and reburial of persons when burial grounds have been sold. I have even come across an old church sold for renovation to a private residence. However, the buyer could not purchase the adjoining graveyard despite it surrounding the church.
It saddens me even more now that I know Corporal James Martin, G Co., was killed in the Reno retreat (charge!) and a decapitated head likely to have been Martin's was found in the Indian village (Thanks, Fred). This opens the strong possibility that the unknown soldier buried in that tomb at Garryowen is County Kildare's only LBH participant.
Exhumation - DNA - Repatriation. The campaign to bring Corporal Martin home begins here....
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Post by gocav76 on Jan 24, 2008 18:02:57 GMT -6
Fred, Don't wish to sidetrack this thread but this is what two different writers report on the ARVN dead. " During the war the South Vietnamese took Arlington National Cemetery for their model and with American advisors began construction in the late 1960s of a national cemetery for the soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN, in American parlance). With the acceleration of the American withdrawal from the war (what the Americans termed "Vietnamization"), the casualties of the ARVN increased exponentially. By the end of the war in 1975 there was a huge but unfinished cemetery; as of 1994 its dilapidation had progressed at a steady rate. Some families paid villagers nearby to tend the graves, but for the most part the graves were abandoned and the tombstones defaced. Goats grazed in the weeds that grew among the graves.
In his memoir of a return to Vietnam after the America War was long over, Neil Sheehan observes, "In Washington, the names of each of our Vietnam dead were inscribed on a memorial near the hallowed temple to Abraham Lincoln. No one accepted responsibility for these dead ARVN soldiers. . . . In death they were discarded." Sheehan's Vietnamese guide, Mr. Tien, himself a veteran of the war who fought against the ARVN, was moved to say, "This should not happen to anyone." The comparison with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington is quite apt. Sometimes war memorials are constructed too long after a war is over, as American vets argued when they pressed for what eventually became the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The ARVN cemetery at Bien Hoa shows that they can sometimes be built too soon. In the accompanying photograph, for example, the name of the Buddhist sergeant Le Dinh Suong is preserved, as well as his branch of service (marines) and the date of his death (May 13, 1969), but his picture has been chiseled out. Of all the monuments one could imagine, none expresses more directly the arbitrary way time has of dealing with the war dead than the poor traces of memorials that survive at Bien Hoa."
Article by David Lamb Times staff writer. "BIEN HOA, Vietnam--All but the ghosts have abandoned the wartime cemetery here. No relatives visit. The monument to honor the sacrifice of the dead stands unfinished. The pagoda for family prayer is empty. Weeds run wild among the graves, and headstones lie toppled. A generation ago, when these boy soldiers died, bereaved mothers encased their photographs in the stone markers. Surprisingly, many of the pictures have not faded. The faces--clear-eyed, clean-shaven, proud--look much like those of the young men one sees today on the streets of Hanoi. Even the names chiseled in granite here in southern Vietnam are no different from those one might find in the manicured military cemeteries of the North and the central highlands that are tended by children and veterans organizations: Nguyen Van Them, Do Van San, Pham Hiem, all buried as teenagers. But there is one big difference. The Northern cemeteries are for the fallen soldiers of the victorious North Vietnamese Army, or NVA. And these vast, desolate grounds, a 45-minute drive north of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), are where the vanquished lie --the men who fought for the Republic of Vietnam, as the South was known until its collapse in 1975.
The contrast between the cemeteries in what was once two countries underscores the unspoken conflict in Vietnam's heart over how--or whether--to forget the past. In many ways, Hanoi has had an easier time reaching out to its former enemy, the United States, than its brothers who fought for the South.
From a nearby village, Nguyen Tan Trung, 25, approached the cemetery the other day on his bicycle, pedaling along the rutted dirt road once lined with handsome willows but now treeless and barren. On the way, he passed a sprawling water-bottling plant recently built on the edge of the hallowed grounds.
The cemetery was eerily still. Once a year, to mark the lunar new year, Trung and a handful of volunteers from the village cut the knee-high grass covering the graves. Once in a while they get letters from Vietnamese families in North America or Australia asking them to search for the grave of a loved one. If they find it, they honor the dead with incense.
Asked why the cemetery had been forsaken, Trung replied: "Who cares about this place? This belongs to the time before 1975."
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Post by fred on Jan 24, 2008 18:52:03 GMT -6
At the time, I believe it was either open range or on the boundary of the Paiute tribe's reservation. They don't have that land any longer. No, Billy, you misunderstood. I realize, at the time, the land was unowned. My point is, if you were a soldier and you thought you might be killed in combat, wouldn't you prefer to have your body interred in a National Cemetery or with your family? Since burial with the family might be impossible in this case, they were soldiers and I think it is the government's responsibility to step in and say-- basically-- those men were government property. Give them up, buster, or else. They do it with a man-o-war at sea. Regardless of where a sovereign ship goes down, it remains the property of its country. Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by fred on Jan 24, 2008 19:13:05 GMT -6
Larry--
Beautifully done.
You have illustrated my point better than I could. Anyone who dies for his country-- whether ARVN, NVA, American, Indian, German-- deserves a proper burial in a proper place. (Obviously, you make exceptions for the idiots, the Hitlers and the like!) Some guy's ranch, purchased 20 or 120 years after the battle, isn't it. Nor is some vault fronting a gift shop, a Subway,a snack bar, a gas station, and a broken-down museum.
Best wishes, Fred.
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Post by Scout on Jan 24, 2008 19:21:51 GMT -6
What kind of return could you possibly expect to have on this deal? The LBH businesses thrive for only about 4 or 5 months in summer only and then you have those Montana winters. Not to many tourists roaming around in 10 below temps. So technically you would lose your a@# financially. You would have to do incredible business in the summer to pay off 6.5 million by selling wooden tomahawks. I agree with you Fred...the only value here is the archival items. Hopefully all will find good homes in other collections and museums.
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Post by gocav76 on Jan 24, 2008 19:42:32 GMT -6
Fred, I agree with you, the remains deserve a much better fate. I've done some research on the subject, and I believe the Indian Wars dead were just overlooked by the U.S. government. We had the Civil War re interment program 1866-70. During the Spanish American War President McKinley issued orders that all remains were to be brought home. This also covered Philippine Insurrection and North China Expedition. During the World Wars families were given the option of having the remains brought home or placed in U.S. Military Cemeteries. I guess the Indian War dead were just forgotten. Someone could write the Army Quartermaster Department for info. Larry
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