It suddenly dawned on me that the signs admonishing me to behave in a certain way weren't so much to ensure proper respect for the dead, but a kind of recruitment poster for potential and future servicemen. In my mind the phrase eternal rest suddenly turned into parade rest, the military term for being at ease while still in a military formation. I felt that every corpse interred at Arlington was there to seduce living boys to join up and experience the wonders of heroic service to one's country. When I discovered that Arlington National Cemetery was open 365 days a year, from sunrise to sunset, it disturbed me. It seemed as if the dead never had a time to be dead, that they were continually on display, continually in formation to perpetuate a recruiter's dream of power and glory.
Heroic service is the key.
The mythological hero envisioned and praised in ancient literature, where immortality wasn't considered taking up residence in an afterlife, but having the deeds of the hero repeated and praised by living generation after generation. It's not a coincidence that an internationally renown military cemetery, barely 100 years old, and the national depository of the military dead of a nation only 200 years old, is architecturally rooted in the ancient past of Greece and Rome, where the heroic ideal was born and flourished. It's not America one enters when you pass the gates of Arlington. I contend that this unique, American, historical monument is a huge recruitment center rooted in the glorious mysteries of ancient legends of death and sacrifice, and not simply the ornate burial ground for the national fodder that dates from the eighteenth century to the present. My contention that the interpolation of Arlington National Cemetery's seduction in the service of military recruitment was greatly strengthened when I discovered that the United States government maintains 114 national cemeteries, but Arlington is the only one under the jurisdiction of the US Army.