My known unknown soldier

Fairview Cemetery, Bowling Green, Kentucky {bgky.org/cemeteries}

I met him through a chance encounter.

It was Memorial Day weekend, and I had stopped at the military section of Fairview Cemetery in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Quite a contrast there – the eternal stillness of our fallen soldiers side-by-side with a busy road, noisily reminding visitors that life goes on.

For me, Memorial Day had come to feel a bit too impersonal. Even with all the flag flying and tribute events, I was reaching for something more tangible. I felt a tug to go to that place where they actually lay. To walk among them. To be still with them for a little while.

And so I had developed my own little routine, wherever I happened to be, to find that special section which is set aside in almost every cemetery in the land. I would sort of aimlessly browse, read a few of the headstones and take in a few of the names and details.

On this particular visit to Fairview, my attention was suddenly riveted. My eyes locked on a date etched into one of the gravestones. November 17, 1950. That was the day he was born. It was also the day my parents were married.

I looked a bit closer. March 19, 1969. That was the day he died in Vietnam. I am mentally engaging now. That means he was 18 years old when he laid down his life in that far-away land. I had been born two years almost to the day after my parents' wedding. He was two years older than me, and I was a junior in high school, sitting in some long-forgotten class the day he died.

At that point in life I was only vaguely conscious how rapidly I was moving toward draft age. By the time of graduation, I knew that my college enrollment in ROTC deferred me from the draft, although that was not the point of it. My father, a WW2 Army Air Corps enlistee, insisted on ROTC if I were to go the military route. Patriotic sentiment was still high in a lot of us who had grown up on WW2 movies and considered fighting Marxists and Nazis to be virtually the same thing. I had developed a fascination with flight and was quite intrigued by the idea of an Air Force career.

As tensions built and exploded in our country, I was also aware that Vietnam had turned into a gruesome meat-grinder for guys close to my age. I was patriotic and liked the military atmosphere, but this was a university where protesters had burned down the Armory building on campus the year before I started college, and the tension continued to grow. Only those who lived through it know how out of place it made one feel, in that era, to walk through the grounds of a school like UK wearing a military uniform one day each week.

By the end of my second year I was feeling a different calling. A transfer to a Bible college ended my deferment and I was now eligible for the draft. My destiny would have to be in God's hands. Getting the notice for my pre-induction physical made the reality of my situation come vividly home to me. When the lottery numbers for the draft were announced for that year, mine was 79 – very, very low.

In any previous year that was a straight ticket to Vietnam. However, President Nixon's attempt to wind the war down had gone into effect, and the number of draftees was beginning to decline. The suspense for me lasted until the fall of the year, when the ceiling for the numbers of those who would be called up was announced – as 75.

As I looked at the headstone, all of this came back. Two years. If I had been born two years earlier, this gravestone might easily have been for me.

I looked at the name. John Franklin Allen. I suddenly sensed a very personal connection. John Franklin Allen. You died, and I didn't, because you were born on the day my parents married instead of two years later.

I never knew John Franklin Allen, and I have been unsuccessful learning anything about him. He is unknown to me. But I have his name. I know when he lived and when he died. He is my Known Unknown Soldier. And he is eighteen years old.

It is amazing what a difference this little bit of knowledge makes when I stop by occasionally and touch the stone that marks his place in history. I remember him. And through that very personal connection, I remember all the others whose lives stopped while mine went on.

-- Published in the opinion section of the Bowling Green Daily News, 23August2026