That Tomb is there in large part as a feature of civic religion, but also because it gives hope to families whose soldiers were never identified. “It just might be my boy here, given Christian burial and honored by the nation,” has to be in the back of the mind of every parent for whom the alternative is unbearable.

That’s one reason why all paperwork relating to the bodies buried there is destroyed, so that there is no chance of accidentally discovering who a soldier is … or, more importantly, all the soldiers he is not. It’s why the US government also decided, following burial of an Unknown from the Vietnam War — who was later identified, removed from the Unknown vault, and returned to his family; there is no Vietnam Unknown there now — not to add further Unknowns from future wars: With advances in technology, it has become virtually impossible for any remains to be truly Unknown.

Anyway, if we try to put ourselves in the emotional place of the parent or friend of a missing soldier — of whom there were so very many in 1927, less than a decade after the Great War, when memories were still so fresh — this story, awkward and poorly executed as it was, may have a little more value.

Not scolding, not disagreeing with anything anyone has said. Just offering perspective on what this story may have meant to our great-grandmothers when it was originally published.

Lincoln the dead president decides to finally notify the family of the unknown soldier after talking to him in heaven for a while.

Time travel SciFi and fantasy dime novels were gesturing time travel tales, there was lots of expiramentation with historical figures traveling through time, righting past wrongs. The “dark side of time travel” stories mostly start in the 30s, but aren’t really popular until Asimov comes up with a universe with infinite dimensions. (Yeah, I actually read way to much SciFi and fantasy and went through my pulp phase in high school.)

A mother still getting money even though the government didn’t know if he was alive or dead, says the author only had romantic notions about how the military works.

This is before the stock market crash, and gentile poverty, by choice, was a fashionable idea. Suffering was a popular theme, partly because no one thought the market could bust, and the civil war still had those who survived it alive, and spreading a romanticized view of the deprivation and sacrifice for “the cause” of each side was not quite legend, but not quite untraceable.

Someone got a thesaurus for Christmas or a birthday. The word choices are used just wrong enough, with simpler words much more appropriate and understandable.