For eleven years the local Veterans for Peace group has set up the display to remember their comrades and every year, more markers are added.
Each has a soldier's name, age, hometown, date-of-death and branch of service. They lead to a tent where I chatted with some of the veteran volunteers. Many of them have seen what most of us have been spared of, the horrors of war. They want speed the end of war by promoting peaceful solutions to armed conflict.
An older woman, Sara Marks, told me if I stuck around I could talk with one of their leaders, Scott Camil. This surprised me. I graduated from Hialeah High School with Scott in 1965.
It was a huge school and we really didn't know each other but I knew when I was joining the University of Florida, he was enlisting in the Marines Corps. After combat in Viet Nam, receiving two Purple Hearts and numerous citations, he came home and enrolled in the University Florida as well. Not long after, he joined the peace movement and the Viet Nam Veterans Against the War.
It was the actions of him, and thousands of people like him, that led to the end of that fifty-year-old conflict that killed millions.
Scott Camil is fairly well-known for being one of the "Gainesville 8", a group of 'Nam veterans who were charged with conspiring to violently disrupt the 1972 Republican Convention. It got a huge amount of publicity back then and at the end of a long trial, all were found not guilty.
When I spoke with Scott yesterday, who I had not seen in 54 years, I thanked him for all he has done, and for all he continues to do. The mile-long roadside cemetery, he says, shows the public the cost of war. They plan to display it every year until all wars end.
He could only talk with me briefly. He had a mission to accomplish and like a good soldier, he went off to get ice for his men.
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