Section 60: Arlington National Cemetery by Robert M. Poole

Author:Robert M. Poole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-09-08T16:00:00+00:00

6

Friendly Fire

No matter how often David Sharrett visits Section 60, he always feels the same sense of dislocation when he makes his way to Grave No. 60-8729, about halfway across the turf, and finds his name on a marble headstone. “It’s like visiting my own grave,” he said, standing before the tomb of Pfc. David H. Sharrett II, his namesake and first son, killed in Iraq in 2008. “Children are supposed to bury their parents, not the other way around.”1

Private Sharrett’s path to Arlington National Cemetery, and his father’s quest to unravel the tangled story that brought his son there, hold enough plot twists for a Shakespearian tragedy—a fitting analogy, given that the elder Sharrett spent a distinguished thirty-year career teaching the Bard to several generations of high school students in northern Virginia.

Sharrett was just wrapping up a lesson on Othello when an otherwise ordinary morning—January 16, 2008—took a sinister turn, plunging him into the worst day of his life. Summoned to the office at Chantilly High School, he found James Charm, a family friend, waiting for him and looking very grim indeed.2

“Hey, what’s up?” Sharrett asked.

“Vicki needs you to come,” Charm said softly, referring to Sharrett’s wife. “Vicki needs you to come home right away.”

“What’s wrong? Is it Dave?”

Charm did not—probably could not—answer.

“Is he okay?” Sharrett asked, panic rising.

“No,” said Charm.

“Is he alive?”

Charm sadly shook his head from side to side.3

“Oh God, Oh God!” Sharrett sputtered, crying for the boy he had raised as a single father before Vicki came along. Father and son had been constant companions and best friends, joined at the hip, in Dave Senior’s phrase. Young Dave, who bore a striking resemblance to his father, had accompanied him to school so often that the older students adopted him as a kind of mascot, nicknaming him “Bean” for his diminutive appearance.

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