Walk among the headstones at Fort Logan National Cemetery just before Memorial Day and you will witness countless small measures of devotion.
They are rendered by the living unto the dead, the more than 92,000 military veterans and family members buried on 214 rolling acres in southwest Denver.
Flowers are placed, flags are planted, graves are tended, honor guards fire salutes.
On Friday, Jose Trujillo raked the sod he had just planted on the final resting place of Donald E. Pennington, a World War II Army veteran who died five years ago.
Trujillo, bronzed from the sun, works in the interment department.
“We bury,” he said.
“I’ve been here over 18 years,” Trujillo said. “I enjoy this job. I’m a vet, and I think the best thing I could do is take care of a vet.”
A hello went up. It was from Beatrice Montoya, a visitor he knew. She had come from her husband’s grave.
“I’ll come to place flags tomorrow, and on Monday I’ll be here with flowers,” she said.
Across the lane was a freshly dug grave for Harry L. Hodges, whose memorial was held in an open-air chapel an hour earlier.
His ashes will lie in a new part of the cemetery. Soon enough he will be joined by more veterans.
Many of them will be served by Gilbert Herrara of American Legion Post 193. He leads a seven-man honor guard whose M1 rifles echo at Fort Logan services.
He and his team had just bugled taps at the service of James Hite, who served in the Navy during the Korean War. They were picking up the brass shell casings to give to Hite’s family.
Hite would be proud that it was Herrara who was there — a 17th Airborne veteran who came home from World War II with a Combat Infantryman Badge and a Bronze Star.
“We honor our fallen veterans,” he told me. “They’re our brothers and sisters, and it really helps their families cope with the loss.”
Herrara is an elderly man who saw good men die in battle. Benjamin Griego is an 11-year-old boy who knows nothing of war except the images he has seen on TV.
But he was at Fort Logan with his fifth-grade class from Traylor Academy, clutching a half-dozen flags he would soon put on the graves of people who died decades before he was born.
“It feels real nice to be honoring the country and the people who fought for it,” he said. “It’d be interesting to know who they were and how they died and what they were doing to help us.”
Who they were, indeed.
I was taking the long way back to my car, strolling through the newly mowed grass in section Q, when I saw it: The wafer-shaped headstone of William Porter.
Few things will focus the mind like seeing your name on a grave.
He hailed from Colorado and served as a private in Company H of the 812 Pioneer Infantry. A veteran of the Great War, the War to End All Wars, he had died the year of my ninth birthday.
There were no flowers on his grave except for two dandelions whose blossoms had gone from yellow to gray and been borne away.
I pulled up the weeds. It seemed the least I could do for a man who fought in a war virtually all of us now know solely from books.
Humanity will never outlive the memory of all wars. But we can honor the memory of those who endured them.
That, too, is duty and devotion.
William Porter’s column runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1977 or wporter@denverpost.com.
