Two other medical folk who travelled over here to Germany with me last week, a radiologist from Wichita, Kansas and a nurse anesthetist from St. Louis, drove with me this morning to the large American cemetery outside Luxembourg City. This was my first visit to a national cemetery outside the United States. Over 5000 graves lie here, each marked by a white granite cross or Star of David. We chose this one because it is also the final resting place of General Patton, who led the Third Army across Europe during WW II. I had special interest in coming here because I wear Patton’s Third Army patch on my “combat veteran” sleeve ever since serving in Saudi Arabia in 1991. He died after WW II officially had ended, but his wife insisted that he be interred here, in Europe, among his troops, rather than be sent back home to California. As if to create a hierarchy of sadness among the rows of tombstones, there are twelve sets of brothers laid to rest here, side by side, and one pair of “friends,” according to the cemetery’s rolls. Two busloads of German tourists arrived as we were leaving. I turned around and walked back among them for a while, trying to understand what they were saying (What would one say here?), but they spoke too softly for me to hear. For an American, the symmetrical array of headstones –located between two flagstaffs and two sets of murals depicting the 1944 campaign of the Battle of the Bulge, during which most of these young men died — presents a powerful visual and emotional experience that can be appreciated by anyone, regardless from which city their tourbus originated. Some WW II General (it may have been Eisenhower himself) said that military cemeteries were the best argument against war that could ever be made. Gotta go.