Visiting best friend's grave at Fort Snelling

Gary Buysse and Jim Meger were best friends for nearly 70 years before the latter died of cancer 10 years ago.
For the first time since Meger's death, Buysse made a visit to his gravesite at Fort Snelling National Cemetery in St. Paul. The visit was as surprising as it was emotional to Buysse.
Meger, a Minneota native, gained national prominence as a wildlife artist.
"As I walked up to the grave and read that he had died in 2011, I thought 'Oh, my God, it's been 10 years already?' I couldn't believe it. I was speechless," Buysse said.
Another thing written on the military headstone surprised him even more.
"I didn't know he got a Purple Heart. I'd known him since before we even started school and he never told me anything about receiving a Purple Heart," said Buysse, who was a Petty Officer 3rd Class with the U.S. Navy aboard a troop ship that patrolled the South China Sea.
Meger's widow, Laurene Meger, lives in the Twin Cities and said Jim, who was a Captain in the U.S. Army, rarely spoke about his time spent in Vietnam during the war.
"He just never spoke about it to anyone, including me, except for the men he was in the Army with," she said. "He took some shrapnel during the war, and he also punctured his eye jumping out of a helicopter. But very few people knew about it."
Buysse was accompanied by his wife, Mary, their son Tim, daughter-in-law Sue, and granddaughter Gretta to Fort Snelling.
"We were looking for Mary's cousin who is buried at Fort Snelling," Buysse explained. "I decided to look for Jim’s grave as long as we were there already. Tim went online and looked for where the grave was. It was in Section 27 and was number 1149. It didn't take us long to find it."
Meger, who won the Duck Stamp contest in 1980 for his painting of a canvasback duck, was an avid outdoorsman. The Pheasants Forever chapter secured two parcels of land four miles north of Taunton and dedicated it as the Jim Meger Wildlife Management Area in a ceremony in October of 2017. Then Governor Mark Dayton and Lt. Governor Tina Smith were on hand for the ceremony, which fell on the Governor's Pheasant Hunting opening weekend. The memorial stone that sits in the wildlife area is 10 feet wife and six feet high.
"Jim and I used to hunt pheasants together at that same location," said Buysse, whose name is engraved on the front of the large memorial stone marker for his generous donation to the wildlife area and memorial.
Along with Bill Holm, Les Josephson and Larry Tillemans, Meger was named to the "Minneota Mt. Rushmore", a fictitious mountain in which the four most prominent people from Minneota were the overwhelming choices by Mascot readers in a vote last year.