Sixty years ago, on May 8, 1945, the most terrible war in the planet's history ended in Europe. A few more months and it was over in Asia, too.

The president's stop at Margraten was to honor the memory of the 8,000 men buried there, almost all of them airborne troops who were killed during World War II either in Operation Market Garden, the abortive aerial invasion of the Netherlands, or later when Allied forces crossed the Rhine River heading east on their way to the heart of Germany. But it really was to remember all the dead of World War II--the millions and millions of them.

It was a nice gesture. I'm glad the president did it.

Although he wasn't aware of it among the crosses and stars of David in the Margraten cemetery, there is one of special interest to me. It marks the grave of my best friend of high school days, Richard Neal Anderson.

Dick, a glider trooper in the 17th Airborne Division, was killed just a month before World War II ended in Europe, on the same day President Roosevelt died, April 12, 1945. He died not far from Paderborn, Germany, probably as a part of one of the last engagements the 17th Airborne fought. He was 20 years old.

It's hard to believe this all happened 60 years ago, but I have to admit to myself that it did. Sometimes it seems like only yesterday.

Dick's parents learned of his death a few days after April 12, but I didn't find out about it until almost a month later in a letter from my aunt I read as I was sitting in an empty apartment house near the banks of the Mulde River in the ruined city of Dessau. I learned that although I would be going home, he wouldn't.

Somehow I had always thought it would be otherwise, that I would be the one to be killed in action and that he would survive.

It was a sad day for me, but an even sadder time for his parents. Dick was an only child, a kid with a lot of promise. He had won a scholarship in high school. He wanted to be an engineer.

In the Army, as part of the Army Specialized Training Program, he was able to spend a couple of semesters at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before he and a lot of others became infantry replacements.

They made up part of that flood of young men thrown into the final days of the war.

Dick was overseas because he had volunteered to be a glider trooper and because he wanted to be a part of the coming invasion of Europe and--I have to say--because he didn't know any better.

Glider troopers no longer exist. There's at least one good reason--gliders were like ducks in a shooting gallery. They arrived on the battlefield towed by slow-moving transports, then they cut their tow ropes and tried to get to the ground as quickly as possible. Often they were hit by anti-aircraft fire before they could land. More likely they crash-landed and the troopers they were carrying were injured or killed.

Fortunately for Dick the 17th made only one combat descent. His regiment was towed across the Rhine and dropped behind Allied troops crossing the river by boat. Somehow Dick survived this engagement only to be fatally wounded in an attack a few days later.

As with all Allied dead he was not buried in Germany--that somehow seemed sacrilegious. Instead his body was brought to the big Airborne cemetery at Margraten near Maastricht and laid to rest in a green Dutch meadow.

His parents could never bear to visit the grave, but for years a Dutch couple, the Matthew Burdens, cared for it and kept the Andersons advised of how things were in Margraten.

When the Burdens died, three single elderly Dutch people living together in Maastricht took over the job. One of them has since passed on, but the other two faithfully decorate the grave on appropriate holidays--like May 8, for instance. Each year since Dick's mother and father have died they send me a Christmas card to tell me they are still at it.

I've made a single visit to the cemetery myself. It was long ago, back in the 1960s.

I went, like President Bush, to honor the memory and sacrifice of my friend. I cherish the thought that others in Holland have been more faithful and that they still honor it.

They make Dick Anderson's story and the stories of all those Americans who died in World War II one filled both with sadness and satisfaction--with the knowledge that even though there is evil enough in the world to cause it to go to war, there also are people who inhabit it with enough love and trust to remember such sacrifices.

Sixty years have passed since the war which caused all this to happen ended, but it often seems to me only a moment, a second in time.

And I mourn that in another part of the world far from Margraten we are still sacrificing the lives of young men.