Coxswain Lucian F. Johnson, U.S.N., at San Francisco National Cemetery, was born in 1882.  He was 16 when the Spanish American War began.

Although the 1898 Treaty of Paris sealed the fate of the Philippines as an American possession, the United States had been making preparations for defeating the Spanish Fleet and Army in the Philippines for some time and was not to be denied the privilege of projecting American military might in the Pacific for the first time.

The War with Spain in the Philippines is sometimes referred to as "a splendid little war" because it was fought against a deteriorating fleet and army -- the result of the Spanish Empire going broke from her own, prior, projections of power.  Wars and building empires are expensive occupations.

The War with Spain in the Philippines ended so quickly that none of the 76,000 troops trained at and sent from the Presidio of San Francisco to the Philippines enjoyed the combat.  But their fun would soon begin.

Whereas the United States gave independence to Cuba, the U.S., to the dismay of the Philippines independence movement, decided to occupy the Philippines.  After about three years of war, with thousands of Filipinos and U.S. troops killed or wounded, the U.S. won the war against Philippine independence.

Great unrest also prevailed between the Christian North and the Muslim South.  The Muslim population of the Philippines are referred to as "Moros."  One thing led to another, and a lot of Moro blood was shed.

Coxswain Johnson died January 7, 1913.  1913 was an especially bad year for the Moros of Mindanao. 

Although General John Pershing, who a year later would become Commander of the Presidio of San Francisco, had, ten years earlier, disarmed the Moros, as well as diluting Moro strength in the South via relocation and the building of settlements in the South to be occupied by Christians; the Moros continued to resist American rule.

Six months after Coxswain Johnson died, General Pershing ordered an attack on the Moros which turned into a massacre with numbers expressed in hundreds to thousands of Moros men, women and children being slaughtered.  Although General Pershing was criticized for his actions, a Congressional investigation into the matter never materialized.