We’re visiting 4 Louisiana soldiers today. That’s what they call it here … not “seeing a grave,” but “visiting a soldier.” A lot of people come to see them. About 1,300,000 a year… more than 3,500 people every day that come to “visit the soldiers.”

9,387 of them serve there. They say that too, because their service never ends. On average, they’re about 24 years old. The youngest is only 16 because he believes in it so much that he lied about his age and defied his parents so he could be here. That’s not much older or younger than my own boy. The thought that they are mostly just babies makes me want to cry and I dare not try to talk.

The visitors are from everywhere. Some of them have been before, once, twice, many times. Some of them were “there.” Yes, really “there” in that moment when they thought it would likely be their first and last and forever time. Today it’s the 90 year-old Englishman with his wife, the Channel and the plunging cliffs to his back, telling everyone how he waded ashore and lived to come back time and again since 1944.

It’s peaceful here. Beautiful and manicured and symmetrical and everything it wasn’t then. The guide introduces us to Sgt. John Ray. His alabaster cross is inscribed with the word “Louisiana.” He is ours.

The Lt. Governor is given the honor of lowering the flag from the main pole just before sunset. The superintendent asks who in the delegation has been in the military or been a Boy Scout.

I watch it come down, my hand over my heart, just like in grade school. I take a corner and hold it tight, fold it over, and then once more. Mine is the corner of the last fold, the one that gets tucked into the triangle.

My hand slides inside, feeling every seam and ripple, every stitch in every star that they continue to serve.

My hand, enveloped in land of the free, and the home of the brave.