Program and talk by Ron MacDonald, author of the Arlington Anthology; Fiction & History, www.outskirtspress.com. Pictured; the Arlington House.

Perseverance, Courage & Valor; traits of the people buried at the Arlington National Cemetery. Located in Arlington County Virginia on 624 aces, this is where the dead of the nation’s conflicts have been buried, beginning with the Civil War. Established in May 1864, the cemetery has approximately 400,000 graves.

The site, which had been the estate of confederate general Robert E. Lee’s wife Mary Anna Custis (a great-granddaughter of Martha Washington), is also the site of the Arlington House, Memorial Drive and the Arlington Memorial Bridge, together the “Arlington National Cemetery Historic District”.

Ron told several moving stories of courage and bravery of soldiers from the past. A WWII Chaplin by the name of Hopkins who was in a prison camp and made a flag to honor the American soldiers who died in a Nazi camp. The flag made of burlap and the blood of soldiers for the red stripes.

Ron told of a solider fighting on the island of Saipan during WWII able to speak Japanese and helping save hundreds of Japanese soldiers from being killed by encouraging them to surrender instead of being buried in the caves they were hiding in.

Ron closed his presentation by reminding us of the courage and sacrifice that our founders, the writers of the Declaration of Independence, gave to pen that document and pledge their loyalty to the creation of a new nation, The United States of America.

Paragraph 2 of the Declaration of Independence states: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That, to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed. That, whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…

The esteemed President Patrick Dolphin thanked our speaker and noted that a donation in his name is being made to Habitat for Humanity from the Arcadia Rotary Club.