Plot B, Row 10, Grave 36

(Don Dale photo, 2004)

Who was Cecil Woodrow Winburne, U.S. Army serial number 6882691?

It's a question I gnawed on during our 60th-anniversary study tour of the 1944 Allied invasion of Europe. We visited the battlefields. Then we visited the American military cemeteries, those vast stone gardens of death.

More than 93,000 American dead from World War II are buried in those cemeteries, which stretch from England through Normandy and into the Ardennes.

Today, they are peaceful reminders of sacrifice and courage. Visitors -- and there are always visitors -- move quietly among the graves.

I found Private Cecil Winburne's cross in Plot B, Row 10, Grave 36, in the American cemetery in Luxembourg. He is among 5,075 people buried there. Most were killed in the Battle of the Bulge or the Allied advance to the Rhine.

I photographed Winburne's grave in 2004 because the inscription noted that he was a Virginian. Who was he? You can't tell from the spare words on his marker. When I got home, I decided to do some research.

Private Winburne, I learned, was from Richmond. In the late 1930s he was a clerk at Miller & Rhoads department store. He lived on New Kent Avenue just across the Lee Bridge, with his mother, Minnie, and his father, Ernest. As war loomed, Winburne enlisted in the Army. He was assigned to the 194th Glider Infantry Regiment, took his training in Tennessee, and shipped out to England in August 1944. On December 23, he was flown into France, and on Christmas Day his unit took over a sector of the defense of the Meuse River. Patton then gave orders to seize a small town in Belgium where the Germans had mounted a brutal resistance. Winburne's unit sustained heavy casualties, but it achieved its objective.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch printed a short article in late January 1945 that said Private Winburne died from wounds received in action. He was 30 years old. He was awarded a Purple Heart.

We toss around the word "hero" too often today. But by the more stringent standards of nearly 70 years ago, Winburne's unit unquestionably had its share of valiant men.

I like what author Thomas Heggen said in 1946 in his book "Mister Roberts." Heggen warns against using the word "hero" to describe all those who died during the war.

But, he says, "they are all equally dead. And you could say this affirmative thing of all: that in a war of terrifying consequences and overwhelming agony, they participated 100 percent. ... They are the chosen."

If Cecil Woodrow Winburne of Richmond did not die in a manner that history will long remember, we can nevertheless echo what Heggen said: Private Winburne was one of the chosen.