05/26/2026
🇺🇸 Our story of the week is a solemn but appropriate choice, first published two years ago.
Belleville veterans are immortalized all over our great big small town, from the Veterans Memorial Fountain to Belleville's Vietnam Memorial. (See comments)
All gave some, but some gave all.
600 American flags lined West Main for Captain Ellie LeBeau Cooke's funeral procession Saturday, September 23, 2023. In all, 1,080 flags were positioned along the funeral route. A caravan of pickup trucks carrying the flags then rendezvoused at Mt. Carmel Cemetery right alongside Ellie's grave. In production line fashion, the flags were respectfully packed neatly away & loaded up. It was quite an undertaking.
If you were fortunate enough to witness Ellie's funeral profession, you'll never forget it.
And we'll never forget Ellie.
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"Saving Private Belleville" - First published Memorial Day 2024
Toward the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller is looking down from the bluffs at the devastation on Omaha Beach when Sergeant Horvath says to him, "That's quite a view." "Yes, it is," Captain Miller replies.
Saturday, September 23, 2023: Leading what was possibly the longest funeral procession Belleville has ever seen, a Marine Osprey pilot makes the journey from St. Peter's Cathedral in Belleville to very nearly the end of the longest main street in America, & her final resting place in Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
It was quite a view.
If you saw it, you're not likely to forget it, particularly the Osprey flyover of the gravesite services - an awe-inspiring tribute, as well as a grim reminder of how the Captain met her fate.
The streets were lined with hundreds of Americans from all over the country, all there to honor one of Belleville's favorite daughters, one who laid the ultimate sacrifice upon the alter of freedom.
About five years ago, almost to the very day of the funeral, the Saint Clair County Historical Society sponsored a walking tour of Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
The career paths of the residents of Mount Carmel are as divergent and controversial as the ground the cemetery sits on. There are celebrated statesmen, (one who brought us Scott Air Force base ironically) mobsters, police who devoted their lives to bringing them to justice, corrupt politicians who stole us blind, physicians, the forgotten poor, & everyone in between.
And for 8 months now, Mt. Carmel has been home to at least one true-blue American heroine from the hill. So much of who & what we ever were is buried there with her on that bluff, but Ellie represents all that's still good about us & ever was.
Is Belleville still worth the life of one good American? Is our way of life? Ellie Cooke believed it. She gave her life for it, & in the wake of her death, she had our hearts & minds trained on the price of freedom, at least for a little while. That's the eternal legacy of the fallen: They pull us back to what matters most. They beckon us to do better, always touching center.
Toward the end of Saving Private Ryan, a fatally wounded Captain Miller looks at Private Ryan & says, "Earn this."
That line wasn't just for Private Ryan of course. It was for the viewer. It was for all of us. We're all Private Ryans, charged with the responsibility of earning the deaths of those who gave their lives for ours. It's a debt we can never repay.
Let us resolve that Ellie shall not have died in vain.
We can't bring her back or any of the other Captain Cookes & Captain Millers. The best we can do is try to earn their sacrifice.
There was once a dream that was Belleville, whatever it was.
Who we are, in part, is who we were 210 years ago, & everything we've been since. There's no getting around that. That's why it's always so important to be mindful of our legacy.
But it's incumbent upon us, in this time, in our time, to decide what the dream is going forward.
We are all keepers of that dream. What kind of community do we really wanna be? What do we want future generations to say about us?
On this day when we remember the fallen, let's hope they at least say we tried to earn what so many sacrificed for us, what Ellie sacrificed for us.
~ Alex McHugh for Top of the Hill
Captain Eleanor "Ellie" LeBeau Cooke: April 23, 1994 - August 27, 2023
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
~ Abraham Lincoln "The Gettysburg Address
"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
~ John 15:13
