Veterans Await a Resting Place

That Is Truly Final

November 9, 2006
The New York Times
By JANE GROSS

QUAKERTOWN, Pa. — Cindy La Belle made a deathbed promise to her husband, Frank: He would get a soldier’s burial in a veterans cemetery close to the Cherry Mobile Home Park where they lived, so she could visit often and eventually rest beside him. “That was his wish, and I’m prepared to wait however long it takes,” Mrs. La Belle said.

It has been nearly a year, and there is no telling when Frank La Belle’s wish will become reality. The two closest veterans cemeteries are full. The nearest available spot is more than two hours away. And the acquisition of land for a new cemetery here in Bucks County is moving slowly.

So while Mrs. La Belle waits she has turned a sliver of their trailer into Frank’s Room. There his ashes, in a marble box, are surrounded by fishing gear, Philadelphia Eagles paraphernalia, family photographs and medals from Vietnam. The federal government is racing to keep pace with the deaths of America’s warriors. Half of the country’s 124 veterans cemeteries are closed to burials. More than 1,800 veterans die each day, 12 percent choosing a soldier’s burial.

Deaths are expected to peak this year, at 688,000, and continue near that level for a long time, as 9.5 million of the nation’s living veterans are over the age of 65. The Department of Veterans Affairs says it will take at least until 2009 to catch up with demand.

The problem can be traced to a long lull in building cemeteries, between 1940 and 1970. The few built were on sites the government already owned or got free, often far from the veterans who needed them. This was cheaper and easier in the short term than venturing into the private marketplace, but the path chosen by the V.A. merely delayed the inevitable.

With a push from Congress, the department in 1999 began the largest expansion of the national cemetery system since the Civil War. Twelve regions of the country were identified as needing new cemeteries, those with at least 170,000 veterans and no available burial sites within 75 miles — the distance that families said they were willing to travel.

Five of the 12 have been built. But there is pent-up demand: Long-dead soldiers in urns, mausoleums or civilian plots, resting in temporary peace until a new cemetery opens. That can happen in two years under the best of circumstances. More common is a five- or six-year process, which includes Congressional oversight and separate appropriations bills at every step of the way.

When the nation’s newest veterans cemetery opened near Sacramento on Oct. 16, the first to be buried were Alvin Hayman, a second lieutenant in the Marines during the post-World War II occupation of Japan, and his wife, Irene. He had died in 2004, his remains kept in an urn for two years. His wife died in 2000 — about the time that Mr. Hayman, a home builder, decided to sell 550 acres to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Her ashes sat for six years waiting for the new cemetery.

The real estate deal that Mr. Hayman embraced took four years to close — just five days before he succumbed to cancer. Jon Hayman, the couple’s 56-year-old son and formerly a partner in his father’s real estate business, said the pace of government bureaucracy was slow. “He had hoped to see the first burial, not be the first burial,” Mr. Hayman said from his home in Los Altos, Calif.

The cemetery in Atlanta, six months after opening, continues to hold delayed burials. The director, Sandy Beckley, said 303 of its first 530 funerals were for veterans who had died as long as three years ago, with 120 still on the calendar. Where burial grounds are at capacity, the department looks for ways to squeeze in more people, sometimes buying adjacent land or building columbaria for cremated remains.

At a Civil War graveyard in Marietta, Ga., which Ms. Beckley also runs, three people killed in the Iraq war have been accommodated by removing a grove of dead trees and using space relinquished by veterans’ spouses who had remarried.

But southeastern Pennsylvania needs more than nooks and crannies. The Philadelphia National Cemetery closed to most burials in 1962 and stopped in-ground cremations last year. Beverly National Cemetery across the river in Burlington, N.J., is also full. There is still room at Indiantown Gap, near Harrisburg, but that is 120 miles from some parts of Bucks County. Even farther is a new cemetery near Pittsburgh.

The preferred site in the region was next to Valley Forge National Historic Park, popular with veterans and politicians but opposed by historians. Once that fell through, the department had to scramble for land.

After years of looking, and heavy pressure from Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Senate Veteran Affairs Committee when the long process began, the department settled on the current site, a vast field of spent corn owned by Toll Brothers, the country’s largest builder of luxury homes. It is appealingly flat, free of contamination and close to the scene of a major Revolutionary War battle.

But the local politics is tricky and Toll is driving a hard bargain. This month, to the V.A.’s delight, three townships that jointly make land use decisions each approved a necessary zoning change. Yet hurdles remain before the government can write Toll Brothers a $7 million check.

Toll Brothers has pared its plan to 170 homes on the 311-acre site. With $41 million for six cemeteries nationwide, the department can afford only 200 of Toll Brothers’ acres. The developer is determined to build the same number of houses, so now the V.A. must expedite a deal for Toll to buy an adjoining parcel.

“We’re caught up in stuff we’re not usually caught up in,” said Bill Tuerk, the under secretary of memorial affairs. “It’s a torturous process.”

At least two women in the county have decided the wait is already too long. Catherine Leckie, another Vietnam-era widow, is one of them. Her late husband, Arthur, a marine, died a year and a half ago of a cancer caused by Agent Orange. Mr. Leckie had been awed, years ago, by his parents’ funeral at Arlington National Cemetery, she said, which was “like seeing a president buried on TV.”

A full veteran’s burial appealed to her, with a 21-gun salute, taps played by a lone bugler and the American flag snapped into a crisp triangle. Indiantown Gap was too far from her home in Ottsville, Pa. So following her husband’s humorous last wishes, lifted from an article called “Going Out With a Bang,” she loaded part of his ashes into shotgun shells that a dozen of his buddies fired over favorite duck blinds or fishing holes. The remaining ashes are stored in an old shotgun shell box beside her bed.

When Mrs. Leckie heard from local Veterans Affairs officials that a cemetery was in the works, she briefly considered a full soldier’s burial for the shell box, thinking her husband would have liked the military pomp. She even discussed it with her mother, herself an Army widow, who lives nearby, also with her husband’s remains at home. After all this time, they decided to leave well enough alone.

“We did what we did when there were no other choices,” Mrs. Leckie said, “and we’re good with that.”

Updated 12/15/2006
5:44 AM ET
USA Today
By Rick Hampson

ARLINGTON, Va. — The rows of gravestones stretched out before him like time itself. But when John Lechler saw the date on one particular tombstone, he knew where to lay his wreath. And for a moment, Army Air Corps 2nd Lt. Gordon H. Sterling Jr., who died on Dec. 7, 1941, lived again.

The balsam fir wreath was from Maine — made by hand, decorated by hand, wrapped, boxed and loaded on a truck by hand, then driven 750 miles to Arlington National Cemetery.

This is the miracle of Arlington. "When you first look at that sea of stones, you don't get the impression of individuality," says Tom Sherlock, the cemetery historian. "But if you stop for just a moment and look at the name on the stone, in that moment they're thought of again, and they live again."

Lechler was one of about 600 volunteers at the cemetery Thursday for what has become a new holiday tradition: placing Christmas wreaths — supplied by a Maine businessman who never got over his first sight of the cemetery — on more than 5,000 veterans' graves.

"It's great that we came together to show our gratitude, considering how tough it is for everybody with this war going on," says Lechler, 42, an Ashburn, Va., resident who runs a sports training business and who never served in the military.

Every December for the past 15 years, Morrill Worcester, owner of one of the world's largest holiday wreath companies, has taken time in the midst of his busiest season to haul a truckload of wreaths to Arlington from his small Downeast Maine town of Harrington.

For years, he and a small band of volunteers laid the wreaths in virtual obscurity. But in the last 12 months that has changed, thanks to a dusting of snow last year at the cemetery, an evocative photograph, a sentimental poem and a chain e-mail. And this year, Worcester went national. A new program, "Wreaths Across America," shipped a total of about 1,300 wreaths to more than 200 national cemeteries and vets' memorials in all 50 states.

Worcester, 56, says he wants to help Americans remember and honor deceased military veterans, particularly at Christmas, when they're missed most. On the Wreaths Across America website, he makes this comment: "When people hear about what we're doing, they want to know if I'm a veteran. I'm not. But I make it my business never to forget."

On Thursday he looked at the crowd of volunteers — five times as many as last year's — and said, "I didn't realize there were this many people that felt like I do."

This year, Worcester's wreaths got to Arlington in a red, white and blue semi-trailer that followed U.S. Highway 1, escorted by a military veterans motorcycle group. In some towns, flag-waving crowds turned out to welcome the convoy as it passed through.

The wreaths were placed in a hilly, wooded section of the cemetery that has the graves of forgotten doughboys and GIs, as well as those of astronaut moonwalkers, Dr. Walter Reed and the general at Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge who told the Nazi commander demanding his surrender "Nuts."

"We want to honor the veterans, and we do it with the products we make ourselves," says Worcester's wife, Karen. "We're like the Little Drummer Boy. He had his drum. We have our wreaths."

Awestruck by Arlington

Morrill Worcester's road to Arlington began in 1962 when he won a trip to Washington for selling new subscriptions to the Bangor Daily News on his newspaper route.

He was 12, an impressionable age to visit a city filled with unforgettable sites. What struck him most was the national cemetery — now the final resting place of more than 300,000 — and its endless lines of perfectly aligned stones:

"That stuck with me all these years, the enormity of the cemetery," Worcester says. "And the fact that everyone buried there had a personal story, and aspirations and plans for the future, like we all do."

Years later, as a sophomore at the University of Maine, he realized there was money to be made in Christmas wreaths. He could buy wreaths that local people made at home and take them to Boston to sell to a wholesaler. That first year he sold 500.

It was the beginning of the Worcester Wreath Co., which in 1982 became a supplier for Maine's mail order giant, L.L. Bean.

In 1992, during one of his company's periodic expansions, Worcester got a call in December from one of his warehouses. "We're up to our knees in wreaths," his foreman announced — they'd overproduced several thousand.

"I said, 'Well, I'm not just gonna throw them away,' " he recalls. "That's when I thought of Arlington." He called Washington for permission to lay his wreaths. To his surprise, he got it.

But when he arrived at Arlington, Worcester was stunned by the size of the area to be covered. It was just Worcester, his son and about a dozen others. It was raining. It took six hours. Afterward he was wet, tired — and exhilarated. There, buried in the Virginia soil, he had found the cost of freedom.

A tradition builds

Every December after that, Worcester, his family, his employees and his friends gathered on a Sunday to decorate wreaths and load them on a truck provided by a local company. Worcester and a few others drove to Arlington, laid 5,000 wreaths and were back at work within a few days.

Each year, Worcester was assigned a different part of the cemetery, usually an older section whose graves received less attention. Every stone got the same simple 20-inch wreath, adorned only with a red bow. Before leaving, the volunteers laid wreaths at the graves of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, the USS Maine memorial and the Tomb of the Unknowns.

When Worcester started his business in 1971, he was 21 — the average age, he would point out, of U.S. servicemen killed in World War II. He had a college draft deferment, but he never forgot the sacrifices of those who did serve.

"I'd been lucky," he says, "and I wanted to give back."

Christmas wreaths had made him rich. Now, he felt he was reclaiming the true meaning of a wreath, showing it as something more than a glitzy holiday ornament: "We wanted to get back to the simple idea of what a wreath represents — respect, honor, victory."

This was a different kind of victory, though — a victory of remembrance, a victory over death itself.

But, he is asked, what was the point of their sacrifice? Did the doughboys make the world safe for democracy in World War I? Did the Spanish-American War keep America free? And what about Iraq, a war which has steadily lost public support?

"This is non-political," Worcester replies. "These people died for us. If they died in vain, I don't know. But they all deserve our respect."

The tradition grew slowly. Every year there were a few more volunteers in Harrington to load the truck and a few more in Arlington to lay the wreaths. Every January there'd be a few more calls, e-mails or letters. Worcester says that apart from a newspaper story here and a broadcast report there, "it was almost a private thing."

Until December 2005.

Buzz on the Internet

When the day was almost over and all the wreaths had been laid, it started to snow. Around the same time, an Air Force news photographer covering the event went back for a final picture before heading back to the Pentagon.

Master Sgt. James Varhegyi had shot hundred of images that morning. In accordance with photojournalistic convention, almost all had people in them.

But this time Varhegyi took a picture that had no people, just rows of graves, decorated with bowed wreaths, on snowy ground. White, green, red — the colors of Christmas. He didn't think it was anything special.

When the Worcesters returned to Harrington, things quieted down as usual after Christmas. Except that instead of declining in January, the appreciative calls and e-mails began to increase.

Varhegyi's photo had been posted on an Air Force website, from which someone — the Worcesters don't know who — had lifted it, put it in an e-mail, and added a poem:

Rest easy, sleep well my brothers.

Know the line has held, your job is done.

Rest easy, sleep well.

Others have taken up where you fell, the line has held.

Peace, peace, and farewell …

"Please share this with everyone on your address list," the e-mail read. "You hear too much about the bad things people do. Everyone should hear about this."

The e-mail became an Internet sensation. It spread like a virus, so far and so fast that Snopes.com, a website devoted to exploring myths and rumors, investigated and confirmed its existence.

More and more people contacted Worcester Wreath Co. with questions, thanks and requests. By February, the company was getting 30 to 40 e-mails a day. People sent checks, which were returned. Company staffers found themselves devoting more and more time to phone calls about the Arlington effort.

One night, Sherry Scott, the office manager, was working late, trying to get caught up, when the phone rang:

"It was an elderly woman from Texas. She says, 'Tell me you're the company that lays the wreaths at Arlington.' When I said we were, there was silence. Then she started crying. She says, 'My Dad's buried at Arlington.' Then I started crying."

Karen Worcester says that many people seemed to appreciate that even though they couldn't go to Arlington to visit a loved one's gravesite, "it's like we go for 'em." She'd print the e-mails out and read them to her husband at night. Sometimes they'd wind up crying.

She rose before dawn to read e-mails and write replies. She did not consider herself eloquent: "What do you say when someone tells you, 'I just buried my son.' ?"

By summer, hundreds of e-mails were coming in each day. Karen began to notice a refrain: "They said, 'Can you do that here where we are? Can't I get a wreath?' I thought, 'We can't do every grave. But we can do every cemetery.' "

Fine, said her husband: How?

By August, they knew.

Worcester Wreath would send six wreaths to veterans' cemeteries in every state. Members of the Civil Air Patrol, a national organization that has chapters in every state, would see that they were distributed.

UPS offered to ship the wreaths at no charge. A company in New Jersey provided 3,000 small flags. A Worcester Wreath employee was delegated to work solely on coordinating the program.

"And to think," Karen Worcester says, "it all started with, 'We made too many wreaths!' "

Story behind the stone

A final word about Lt. Sterling, courtesy of military historian David Aiken. When Japanese planes attacked Wheeler Field in central Oahu during their assault on Pearl Harbor, Sterling was on the ground. He was an assistant flight engineer; he'd passed his flight tests but had not progressed as rapidly as the other pilots. He saw that a group of P-36 fighters was beginning to taxi out, but the formation was short one plane. It sat empty on the tarmac, its engine idling.

Sterling climbed into the cockpit, handed his watch to the crew chief, and said, "Give this to my mother! I'm not coming back!"

He didn't. His plane was shot down off Oahu's eastern shore in a fight with a Japanese Zero and was never recovered. He is the only Air Force pilot still counted as missing in the battle.

Sterling was one of those who had, as Morrill Worcester puts it, "aspirations and plans for the future." His fiancée was a nurse at nearby Schofield Barracks. They had a date that afternoon.

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