Grand and ornate, the nine-foot-tall, decorative marble urns for decades flanked the stage of Arlington National Cemetery's Memorial Amphitheater, adjacent to the Tomb of the Unknowns.

Next weekend, however, the two urns, designed by the same firm that built the New York Public Library and the Russell Senate and Cannon House office buildings, will stand not at the forefront of one of the nation's most venerated shrines but rather are set to be up for sale at the Potomack Company, an Alexandria auction house.

The urns are literally "a piece of history," as the antiques dealer who now owns them likes to say. But their historic value - evident in photos of presidential visits since Woodrow Wilson dedicated the memorial in 1920 - is exactly why preservationists were stunned to learn that they are being sold to the highest bidder.

"It's alarming to see portions of our national legacy being sold off," said Robert Nieweg, director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's southern field office. "It raises some red flags for us, and we have some very significant concerns about the cemetery's stewardship of this extraordinarily historic place."

How the urns, witness to so many public ceremonies, landed in private hands is something of a mystery. Under the strict procedures the federal government has adopted to protect its property - and particularly artifacts with historic and artistic value - the urns should have been restored or put in a museum, not put out on the open market, preservationists say.

Since 1997, the urns have been at DHS Designs, an antiques shop in Queenstown on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Darryl Savage, the owner, is closing his store and auctioning off his inventory, which includes 14 marble balusters that were part of the railing that rings the amphitheater.

In an interview, he said he acquired the urns from another dealer, whom he would not identify. That dealer, Savage said, acquired them from a company that renovated the amphitheater in the mid-1990s. Savage said the company replaced the urns with modern replicas and was allowed to take away the originals.

NAWA, Afghanistan -- The baby’s name was Norzai, her father said, after pausing to remember.

The reason he’d brought her to the Marine base medical clinic was her feet, he said. They weren’t healing.

Not yet 3, her hair an orange hue possibly indicating malnutrition, she lay on the examining cot in a fuzzy pink top and a black bracelet and cried.

Lt. Colin McCormack, the Navy doctor who runs the clinic at Patrol Base Jaker, looked closely under the big light at the girl’s tiny, ruined feet. Third-degree burns on both soles glowed bright red. All 10 toes were gone.

“What happened?” McCormack asked through an interpreter.

“She just dropped into the cooking fire,” her father replied. It had happened three months ago, he said, and he’d sought medical help then. She’d been in a hospital for two weeks in Lashkar Gah, he said. Then they sent her home, and her toes fell off.

There was no sign of infection, McCormack said, and so there was little more that could be done for the child than to clean her feet, apply a thick coating of antibiotic cream, bandage her up and hand her back to her father.

But McCormack and his medics weren’t happy about it.

“Once again, the mechanism of injury and the explanation doesn’t make sense,” the doctor said. “I suspect something else happened.”

He noted that the burn went all the way around one ankle, like a sock — a “circumferential” burn strongly indicating someone had held her leg in boiling liquid and that the child had not been able to recoil from the pain.

“More likely than not,” McCormack said, “this was punishment.”

According to a 2009 U.S. State Department human rights report on Afghanistan, child abuse is “endemic” in the country, based on “cultural beliefs about child-rearing.”

“In extreme examples of child abuse,” the report said, “observers reported several instances of deliberately burned children in Paktia; the children sustained burns after their parents submerged them in boiling water.”

I’m one of the lucky ones.

War destroys without regard to what’s fair or just. This isn’t a new or terribly profound revelation, but witnessing it, and sometimes participating in it, makes it seem like both. In a professional military, the entire point of training is to minimize the nature of chance in combat. But all the training in the world will never eliminate happenstance in war, or even render it negligible.

I returned from Iraq with all of my limbs, most of my mental faculties and a book deal. I wake up every morning in an apartment in New York City. I’m working toward a graduate degree. I have a beautiful fiancée who reminds me to slow down when I’m drinking. And every day I feel more and more detached and removed from the Iraq dustlands I promised myself I’d shed like snakeskin if I ever got back home.

Like I said, one of the lucky ones.

Meanwhile, the black bracelet on my wrist carries the names of four individuals who weren’t so lucky. One got shot through the armpit with a ricocheting bullet and bled out on an outpost roof. Two drove over the wrong piece of street at the wrong time and likely didn’t even know it was a roadside bomb that ended it all. The last one made it through 15 months of war only to get drunk one night back in the States and shoot himself in the face during an emotional breakdown.

In Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel “Slaughterhouse-Five,” the protagonist Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time.” Much of the novel focuses on Pilgrim’s experience of the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II, something Vonnegut himself survived as an American prisoner of war. Like many American literature students, I was required to read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in high school, and if memory serves, I even enjoyed that assignment at 16. But I didn’t really appreciate the concept of becoming unstuck in time until I returned from war. Just like anyone who poured blood, sweat and tears into missions in faraway foreign lands, I left part of myself over there, and it remains there, while the rest of me goes about my business 6000 miles away — a paradox of time and space Vonnegut captured all too brilliantly.

I’ve walked by manholes in New York City streets and smelled the sludge river I walked along in north Baghdad in 2008. I’ve stopped dead in my tracks to watch a street hawker in Midtown, a large black man with a rolling laugh and a British accent, who looked just like my old scout platoon’s interpreter. And I’ve had every single slamming dumpster lid — every single damn one — rip off my fatalistic cloak and reveal me to be, still, a panicked young man desperate not to die because of an unseen I.E.D.

Despite these metaphysical dalliances with time travel the names on my black bracelet are, in fact, stuck in time. Or, more accurately, stuck in memory, where they’ll fade out and disappear like distant stars before becoming shadows of the men we served with and knew.

So it goes.