This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Arlington National Cemetary

  • Another Group Doing Good Things

    In 2011, a lady died in Washington state.  Her name was Shirley McNaughton.  She was 57.

    Shirley McNaughton was a veteran.  She’d served in the USAF for two years during the Vietnam War (1971-1973), and in the ANG for an additional two years thereafter.  She was honorably discharged from the ANG as a Sergeant.

    Unfortunately, at the time of death her surviving daughter had lost her job and did not have the money for a proper funeral.  So Sgt. McNaughton’s remains were cremated (a local program funded that), then were placed in storage for a protracted period at the county coroner’s office.

    Enter the Missing In America Project.

    Per its website, the MIAP is organized to “to locate, identify and inter the unclaimed cremated remains of American veterans through the joint efforts of private, state and federal organizations.”  They learned of Sgt. McNaughton’s yet-to-be-interred cremains, and arranged for them to receive a proper military funeral.

    However, the MIAP this year selected a limited number of cremains to be interred in Arlington vice local state or national cemeteries.  (It’s unclear if this is a one-time event or something that MIAP does periodically.)  Sgt. McNaughton’s remains were among the 6 sets of such cremains selected for that honor – one from each of the 5 military services, plus the cremains of a US Army “Buffalo Soldier” who’d served during World War I.

    Sgt. McNaughton’s cremains will be interred at Arlington National Cemetery on 1 September 2015.  Her surviving family is currently attempting to raise the funds to allow them to attend her funeral via a GoFundMe site.

    I don’t know much about MIAP, so I can’t recommend or endorse them.  But FWIW:  MIAP does post their financials on their website (2014 IRS Form 990).  A quick look at that document leads me to believe they don’t seem to pay their corporate officers or waste a lot of money on fluff, either.  And Guidestar seems to think well of them also.

    So if you have a few spare dollars that you plan to donate to charity anyway, it might be worth your while to investigate them further.  They do appear to be approved to receive donations under the Combined Federal Campaign – though that in and of itself is no guarantee they’re particularly well-run (caveat emptor).  And what they’re doing is certainly IMO worth supporting.

    Everyone deserves a proper burial.  It’s great to see an organization dedicated to trying to make that happen for the unclaimed cremains of veterans.

    . . .

    (Material for this article was obtained from published reports – specifically, this article and this article.)

  • 150 Years of Arlington

    On June 15th, 1864 the first burials were conducted on the grounds of Arlington House. The house and grounds had been seized by the Government from Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary Ann Curtis. The house had been built by George Washington Parke Curtis, Mary’s father and the grandson of George Washington as a tribute and Monument to the Father of our Country.

    In May of 1861 the Union Army seized the house, making it the Headquarters for the Army of the Potomac. In 1864 the Federal Government confiscated the Arlington House and grounds because Mary Curtis-Lee, the legal owner had not paid the taxes in person. Robert E. Lee never returned to the house, Mary Curtis Lee only returned once in 1873 shortly before her death. Neither ever publicly contested the confiscation the property. Their son sued the government after their death and won. The house and its 1,100 acres of land were purchased by Federal Government for the amount of $145,000.

    By 1864 the Military Cemeteries around Washington D.C. were full, new space was urgently needed, Quartermaster of the Army General Montgomery C. Meigs ordered burials to begin at Arlington House. Meigs had been a Junior Officer under Lee and considered him to be a traitor. He had stated the he intended to make the house uninhabitable. Part of that plan was ordering the first 63 individual burials and a mass concrete burial vault (The first monument) for those killed at Bull Run be placed in Mary Curtis’s Rose Garden.

    By the end of the Civil War over 15,000 Burials had taken place at Arlington. Today the number of people buried at Arlington is approaching 300,000. The vast majority of those who rest at Arlington are Military. They include Union and Confederate dead, as well the dead of our nation’s allies as well as enemies.

    When I visit Arlington it is not the grand monuments that capture my attention, it is the rows of identical white head stones, and to me they are a sacred forest of stone that demand silence and respect.

  • Arlington National Cemetery; 150 years anniversary

    Arlington National Cemetery; 150 years anniversary

    800px-Arlington_House

    On June 15th, 1864, Congress approved the use of Robert E. Lee’s estate, which overlooked the city of Washington, as a national cemetery. So began 150 of history being buried beneath those grounds. The Stars and Stripes has written a couple of articles about the history of the plantation. For example, they tell about Jim Parks who had been a farm hand in the days before the Civil War, and a historian in his final days;

    Parks, who lived until 1929, never left the plantation. First he helped build forts, and when the cemetery opened, he became a grave digger. He retired in 1925, the same year that Congress responded to strong public interest in the historic house and passed legislation for its restoration.

    The following year, he showed a local reporter where “coffins had been piled in long rows like cordwood” as the war progressed. He even prepared the grave for Meigs, the man who had ordered the conversion of the estate to a military cemetery.

    Parks took researchers on a tour of the grounds surrounding the mansion, pointing out exact locations for forgotten “wells, springs, slave quarters, slave cemetery, dance pavilion, old roads, ice houses and kitchens,” according to the National Park Service.

    When Parks died, he was buried in the cemetery where he had worked for more than 60 years. He was given full military honors.

    Arlington_National_Cemetery

    When I took my grand-daughter to Arlington when she was still in grade school, she read that sign above and announced that she wouldn’t be continuing on our trip because she read the line “most sacred shrine” as “most scared shrine” so Grampa had to explain it to her.

    In another Stars & Stripes article they tell about the permanent residents of the cemetery who aren’t limited to a single social demographic;

    The cemetery serves a resting place for service members from every conflict in U.S. history, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Soldiers from the American Revolution were reinterred at Arlington after their gravesites were displaced by a development project in Georgetown.

    In addition to U.S. presidents, others buried here include Supreme Court justices, astronauts, war heroes, sports figures and celebrities, including baseball inventor Abner Doubleday, boxer Joe Louis and actor Lee Marvin. All three were veterans.

    “There are 400,000 individuals with all these incredible stories,” Carney said. “If you want to play historical sleuth, you can just pick a name on a headstone, and everyone has an incredible story.”

    There’s a website for the cemetery with more information about the 150th Anniversary, if you plan on coming.

  • Memorial Day


    I can get a great deal on a car in the next few days.   Electronics are on sale.  Hotel’s are booked. It’s the beginning of summer!  All the big networks are wrapping up the TV viewing season.  Schools across the country are out or are counting the few remaining days.

    What I haven’t seen any place is the mention of a parade.  Not a word about honoring those that died in the service of our nation.   No words to the Gold Star families to let them know we have not forgotten.   It saddens me.

    Memorial Day was called Decoration Day as well as Remembrance Day,  no one really knows what town was the first to celebrate it,  several claim it as their own. What is known is that it came into being as an idea about the same time in several places in the late 1860’s.  The Nation was still mourning its dead on both sides of the Civil War.  In 1868 General  John Logan, national commander of the Grand Army of the Republic  issued an order that May 30 would be Memorial Day, for the First time the graves of Union and Confederate dead in Arlington were decorated with flowers.

    By 1890 all of the Northern States were celebrating Memorial Day on May 30th.  Most southern states still has different days of remembrance.  The division between the North and South Remained until after WWI when Memorial Day expanded to Include WWI dead as well.

    Memorial Day remained May 30 until 1971,  When Congress passed the National Holiday act, moving Memorial Day to the last Monday in May, giving federal employees a 3 day weekend. Several Bill have been introduced to move Memorial Day back to May 30, all have died in committee.

    I share the opinion that Memorial Day started to lose its meaning when it was moved.  Celebrations and Parades that used to be common place in small towns across the Nation became less common.  Adding to the problem was the perceived mood of the Nation in the years following Vietnam.   The inevitable commercialism  of all holidays has led to a Generation of Americans that only know Memorial Day for sales, a long weekend and a trip to the lake.

    There are a few notable exceptions. Since the late 50’s on the Thursday before Memorial Day, the Soldiers of the Old Guard place small American flags at each of the gravestones at Arlington National Cemetery. They then patrol 24 hours a day during the weekend to ensure that each flag remains standing. In 1951, the Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts of St. Louis began placing flags on the 150,000 graves at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery as an annual Good Turn, a practice that continues to this day. More recently, beginning in 1998, on the Saturday before the observed day for Memorial Day, the Boys Scouts and Girl Scouts place a candle at each of approximately 15,300 grave sites of soldiers buried at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park on Marye’s Heights. And in 2004, Washington D.C. held its first Memorial Day parade in over 60 years.

    Many feel that memorial day is for remembering all that have died.  It is my belief that this day needs to remain sacred, and reserved only for those that gave their life for the Nation.

    In Flanders Fields

    Lt Col. John McCrea MD.

    In Flanders fields the poppies blow
          Between the crosses, row on row,
       That mark our place; and in the sky
       The larks, still bravely singing, fly
    Scarce heard amid the guns below.

    We are the Dead. Short days ago
    We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
       Loved and were loved, and now we lie
             In Flanders fields.

    Take up our quarrel with the foe:
    To you from failing hands we throw
       The torch; be yours to hold it high.
       If ye break faith with us who die
    We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
             In Flanders fields.

    In 1915, inspired by the poem  Moina Michael replied with her own poem:

    We cherish too, the Poppy red
    That grows on fields where valor led,
    It seems to signal to the skies
    That blood of heroes never dies.

    Whatever your plans this Memorial Day, please take a moment to remember those who gave everything so that we can know Liberty.

    ©2014 This Aint Hell

  • Arlington clean up

    Arlington marker

    Green Thumb, Ex-PH2 and Pinto Nag send us a link to MSN about how the folks at Arlington National Cemetery has decided to change their policy on mementos left graveside in Section 60, the newest section of markers. Needless to say, the families are pretty upset.

    From the Washington Post;

    The changes began in August when cemetery officials decided that Section 60 should be subject to the same rules as the rest of the grounds. “The policy hasn’t changed,” said Jennifer Lynch, a spokeswoman for the cemetery. “The policy is the same, but the enforcement is different.” She said the cemetery was responding to complaints that the section had become too disorderly.

    Cemetery officials put a short announcement about the changes on the cemetery’s Web site this summer, but few saw it. Most families discovered the change when they visited the grounds and found only tape marks where laminated pictures of their loved ones had been hanging for the past several years. Some of the mementos “deemed worthy of retention” were gathered by Army historians for storage at Fort Belvoir, according to a statement from the cemetery. Most appear to have been thrown in the trash.

    Belle’s son, Lance Cpl. Nicholas Kirven, was killed eight years ago in Afghanistan. Ever since, Belle has decorated his grave for his birthday, Thanksgiving, Halloween, Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day and Easter, leaving the adornments up for two or three weeks and then tucking them away in her attic.

    “That’s my way of remembering Nicholas,” she said. “All these silly holidays.”

    You know, Arlington might have credibility in this discussion if they hadn’t misplaced so many of the remains of fallen heroes over the past few years. Their record keeping was a bigger mess than anything Ms. Belle could create.

  • Together for eternity

    Hack Stone sends us a link to the story of James Sizemore and Howard Andre who were friends in college and died together as the crew of a Douglas A-26 Invader in Laos in 1969. Last year a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command task force reached the crash site and recovered the two friends. They will be buried side-by-side at Arlington tomorrow;

    “It’s very meaningful. They flew together, they died together and they ought to be buried together,” James Sizemore’s brother Gene Sizemore said.

    But, ya know what sucks? The family had to pay for the traditional aircraft fly-over at the funeral;

    Sequestration forced the men’s families to pay for the traditional flyover — a final [tribute] to the fallen airmen.

    “In our economy, I think there needs to be a fund for funerals just like this,” James Sizemore’s son told News4. “I think that whatever the government is going to do to balance the budget, they should make it a necessary requirement to honor those families.”

    It’s too bad that the government couldn’t find a couple of bucks in their budget for some fuel so that the Air Force could honorably pay their own tribute to the former pilots, but instead had to stick the family with the bill, like your chintzy old uncle. Especially since the last Secretary of Defense used to stick taxpayers with a bill every weekend when he flew home. One trip home might have paid for a year of overflights for our honored dead.

    If this pisses you off enough to do something about it, Warrior Aviation will accept your donation to help the family pay for a flyover of military aircraft by private civilian pilots.

    The folks from Warrior Aviation wrote to clarify;

    The family is NOT being forced to pay for the fly over by The Warrior Flight Team. All the aircraft owners and aircrews ( USAF,USN & USMC vets themselves) are donating there airplanes and time to fly this most honorable mission. Not sure how the media screwed that up so bad but the only thing the family has asked for is donations to the fuel fund for the 10 aircraft involved which is enormous. We are honored and humbled that the family contacted us and all the team jumped at the opportunity to fly this.

  • Gina Gray; Arlington whistleblower’s ordeal

    gina-gray-photo-02

    Dana Milbank in the Washington Post tells the story of Gina Gray, an actual whistleblower, as opposed to the pretend whistleblowers we’ve read about in the media lately. Gray was a fairly new employee at the Deparment of Defense who tried to tell her superiors about the mismanagement at Arlington National Cemetery and she was fired for her trouble;

    Gray’s ordeal began in April 2008 after I covered the Arlington funeral of an officer killed in the Iraq war. While there, I observed a dispute between Gray and deputy superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, the man later at the center of the Arlington scandals. Higginbotham was trying to prevent reporters from observing the burial, in violation of the family’s wishes and Arlington’s regulations — and Gray, though new on the job, told him he was wrong.

    Gray registered her objections internally — but loudly. She refused to sign off on a report to the Army secretary’s office that was a whitewash of the way burials were handled at Arlington because, she said, her higher-ups were violating Defense Department regulations. She began to learn of other misdeeds by Arlington management and attempted to let military officials know; in June 2008, according to one of Gray’s legal filings, she told the commanding general of the Military District of Washington about “major problems” at the cemetery, involving fraud, mismanagement and broken regulations.

    Two days later, she was fired.

    DoD’s inspector general has recommended that Gray be compensated for her wrongful termination as a whistleblower, but Milbanks writes that he got a statement from the Army Secretary’s office stating that they won’t pay her because she was on a probationary status when she was terminated. Gray’s whistleblowing resulted in a housecleaning among the upper echelon of the the staff at Arlington for their gross mismanagement, most of them were allowed to retire, but Gray was fired outright for exposing them. She remains unemployed and had to drop her lawsuit against the DoD because she ran out of money.

  • Lautenberg to be planted at Arlington

    Someone wrote to us yesterday to tell us that it had been decided that the late Frank Lautenberg will be buried at Arlington after laying in State at the Capitol. From the Daily Journal;

    Frank Lautenberg, the last World War II veteran to serve in the Senate, will be buried Friday morning at Arlington National Cemetery.

    […]

    After the service [in New York City] , Lautenberg’s casket will be taken by color guard to the train station in Secaucus that bears his name. The casket then will travel via Amtrak to Washington, and Lautenberg will lie in repose Thursday inside the U.S. Senate chamber.

    Lautenberg’s casket will lie atop the Lincoln catafalque, constructed in 1865 to support the casket of Abraham Lincoln when his body lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda.

    That’s all well and good, he was a veteran, after all and probably earned a spot in the national cemetery. But the person who wrote us yesterday said that he’d lost his wife recently and the folks at Arlington told him that it would be a four or five month wait for her interment at Arlington. He said a friend had also deceased and his family was told the same. But, because he’s a Senator, Lautenberg jumps to the head of the line? His military service was no different than anyone else’s, so I don’t understand Arlington’s reasoning behind it. I mean, for those people who have to wait months to bury their loved ones, does Arlington have to find more dirt or something? If they can bury a Senator in a week, why can’t they bury the rest in a timely manner? It seems to me that they’re trying to discourage us regular Joes from choosing Arlington as our eternal rest.