ON
HALLOWED
GROUND
THE STORY OF
ARLINGTON NATIONAL
CEMETERY
ROBERT M. POOLE
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Prologue
PART I: DISUNION
1 Leaving Arlington
2 Occupation
3 “Vast Army of the Wounded”
4 First Burials
5 A Question of Ownership
PART II: REUNION
6 “A Splendid Little War”
7 L’Enfant’s Grand View
8 Known but to God
9 A Time to Build Up
10 “We Are All in It—All the Way”
11 The Nastiest Little War
PART III: THE NATION’ S CEMETERY
12 “I Could Stay Here Forever”
13 The Last Unknown
14 War Comes to Arlington
15 Taps
Benediction
Acknowledgments
Appendix I: Arlington Chronology
Appendix II: Regulations for Burial
Notes and Sources
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint
Show me the manner in which a nation or a community cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness the tender sympathies of its people, their respect for the laws of the land, and their loyalty to high ideals.
WILLIAM GLADSTONE
PROLOGUE
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY for a funeral. The last of the season’s cherry blossoms drifted on a cool breeze, which carried the scent of cut grass and wet stone over Arlington National Cemetery. Somewhere in the distance, the early morning mowing subsided, soon to be overtaken by the all-day crack of rifles, the rattle of horse-drawn caissons, and the mournful sound of Taps floating among the tombstones.
Along Eisenhower Drive, as far as the eye could see, the grave markers formed into bone-white brigades, climbed from the flats of the Potomac River and scattered over the green Virginia hills in perfect order. They reached Arlington’s highest point, where they encircled an old cream-colored mansion with thick columns and commanding views of the cemetery, the river, and the city beyond. The mansion’s flag, just lowered to half-staff, signaled that it was time to start another day of funerals, which would add more than twenty new conscripts to Arlington’s army of the dead, now more than 300,000 strong.
This day at Arlington—May 10, 2005—would be much like any other, with funerals taking place from morning until evening. Most of the ceremonies would be small affairs honoring the aging veterans of World War II and Vietnam. Other burials would be for young combatants returning from Afghanistan or Iraq, now headed for Section 60 of the cemetery, where their numbers had grown in recent years. Every funeral, run by specialty units from the uniformed services, was made memorable by the solemn ritual and the attention to detail that crisply pressed young soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, or coastguardsmen brought to the assignment—carrying caskets, firing salutes, slow-marching in formation, driving caissons, folding flags, and offering comfort to friends and family around the grave.
No other nation goes to the effort the United States does to recover and pay tribute to its war dead, a military tradition older than ancient Athens. There, in 431 B.C., selected warriors were returned from the Peloponnesian battlefield with great ceremony, each tribe represented by a dead fighter borne home in a cypress coffin, with one empty bier representing all of the missing, “that is, for those whose bodies could not be recovered,” wrote Thucydides. “The bones are laid in the public burial place, which is in the most beautiful quarter outside the city walls. Here the Athenians always bury those who have fallen in war.”1
The historian might have been describing Arlington. Since the time of Thucydides, societies have developed countless ways of honoring their war dead—by building monuments to those they could not recover, by elevating one unknown warrior to stand for all who sacrificed, by designating holidays for decorating graves with flowers, by establishing national cemeteries on foreign soil to recognize those who died far from home.
Thousands who sleep at Arlington today were brought there by the Civil War, a national trauma so unexpected and so extensive that, five years after Appomattox, recovery teams were still combing old battlefields around Washington to find, identify, and reinter thousands of casualties from both sides. Learning from the mistakes of that war, the United States created a national cemetery system, with Arlington at its heart, and slowly developed expertise in treating its war dead with exquisite care. That tradition continues, as the United States dispatches specialty teams around the world to recover its dead from active theaters of conflict, as well as those from earlier wars.
It was such an effort that finally brought the members of Breaker Patrol, 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, to Arlington for a long-delayed homecoming on May 10, 2005—exactly thirty-eight years after they disappeared in Vietnam: They were Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Malcolm T. Miller, Marine 2nd Lt. Heinz Ahlmeyer Jr., Marine Sgt. James N. Tycz, and Marine Lance Cpl. Samuel A. Sharp Jr. All had died in a fierce fight for the high ground near Khe Sanh on May 10, 1967. While their wounded comrades were evacuated by helicopter, it was too late for Miller, Ahlmeyer, Tycz, and Sharp—left behind but not forgotten. Years after the war ended, forensic teams returned to the battlefield in 2002 and 2003 and recovered thirty-one bone fragments, some teeth, and enough supporting evidence to make positive identifications of the four men. Corporal Sharp was the first to reach home, where he was buried in his native California a few days before the Arlington ceremony. He would be remembered at Arlington, where four caskets stood ready for burial in Section 60—one for Miller, one for Ahlmeyer, one for Tycz, and one for unidentifiable remains representing all of the dead from Breaker Patrol.
The fourth casket containing commingled bones was on its way down to Section 60 from the chapel at Fort Myer. You could gauge its progress by the rattle of drums drawing closer, setting the pace for a slow parade of two hundred mourners, a Marine rifle platoon in dress blues and white trousers, a Marine band in gold braid and scarlet, and, bringing up the rear, a squadron of Rolling Thunder—Vietnam veterans on Harleys. This mismatched procession streamed down the hills in brilliant sunlight, turned left on Marshall Drive, and came to a halt on Bradley Drive, where the earth was laid open to make four new graves.
Six burly marines from the burial detail drew the fourth casket from a silver hearse, marched it across the grass, and stopped by the last grave. The Marine Band struck up the Navy Hymn. The body bearers hoisted the last casket shoulder high until the song was done, then eased it onto a catafalque, lifted away its flag, pulled the edges tight, and held it there as a Navy chaplain began to murmur the familiar words of comfort, but these were snatched away by the sounds of life intruding from all around the cemetery, in the drone of commuter traffic just outside the stone walls, in the whine of jets straining up from Reagan National Airport, in the thump of helicopters lumbering to and from the Pentagon. No matter how solemn the rituals at Arlington, life continued asserting itself from outside. And even in the cemetery, the living formed a link with all of the dead who had gone before—by speaking their names, by recounting their acts of duty and valor, by suspending the other imperatives of life for a few minutes of ritual and reflection. These acts convey a sort of immortality upon the dead, who continue to live as long as they are remembered.
Out among the tombstones, the long journey of Breaker Patrol was drawing to its conclusion. A firing party unleashed a three-rifle volley, a lone bugler stepped forward to sound Taps, and the honor guard began folding the last flag, pullin
g the fabric taut, creasing it, gathering it, and passing it down the line until it formed a tight blue triangle. With a sharp salute, the flag passed to a gunnery sergeant, who cradled it like a baby, marched it across the turf, and presented it to a chaplain. The chaplain, in turn, passed it to a retired Marine commandant acting as next of kin for all of those in Breaker Patrol.
Last of all, the motorcycle vets padded onto the grass and knelt, one by one, at each of the caskets to retire their MIA bracelets. Dressed in faded jeans and camouflage, the bikers looked incongruous among the spit-and-polish crowd that day, but when they stepped up to a grave, stood straight, and snapped off a salute, you could see that they had been soldiers too, and some of them were crying.
With minor modifications, Arlington’s rituals would be familiar to Thucydides or to Homer, who places the climactic scene of his Iliad not in battle but during a lull in the fighting, as Hector’s body is carried home by his father and prepared for a grand public burial.2 The old pattern endures at Arlington, where friends, family, and comrades gather to give thanks for a warrior’s sacrifice, to honor the military virtues, and all too often to make bearable the most unbearable loss of all, the death of a young combatant cut down in the prime of life. The age-old rituals ease the grief, if only for a moment, in a flourish of ceremony, with brass bands, a blaze of rifle salutes, and flags streaming their battle ribbons from the old wars in Mexico, Germany, Guadalcanal, Belleau Wood, and all the others that link today’s warriors with those who marched into combat before them.
Every conflict the United States ever fought is remembered in ceremony and stone at Arlington, none more so than the Civil War, which gave the cemetery its most recognizable traditions. The three-rifle volley signaling the end of a cease-fire; the haunting tune we know as Taps, described as the most beautiful of all trumpet calls; the horse-drawn caissons for transporting dead soldiers from the front; the elaborate honors reserved for unknown soldiers—all of these originated in America’s bloodiest conflict.3
The scars from that war remain etched deep in Arlington’s topography, which also tells the story of the nation’s recovery and healing, of a young country’s growing realization of its power, of its willingness to exercise that power on the world stage through two world wars, the Korean conflict, the Cold War, Vietnam, and subsequent hostilities, each with its flashes of glory, its moments of doubt and agony, and its added burials for Arlington, which continues to grow; from an initial 200 acres established in 1864, the national cemetery covers 624 acres today.
Few images linger in the national imagination as vividly as this hallowed ground, with its ghostly white tombstones, its deep green turf, its gnarled trees alive with songbirds and cicadas. Almost four million people visit the place each year, to pay homage at President Kennedy’s eternal flame on the hillside, to watch the silent, solemn changing of the guard, to walk among the scientists, explorers, jurists, writers, spies, actors, criminals, generals, admirals, and thousands of ordinary citizen-warriors resting at Arlington.
For many visitors, a pilgrimage to Arlington is a devotional act—to seek out a buried relative, to pay respects to a treasured friend, to leave a promised beer or cigarette at the tomb of an Army buddy, to brush off a wife’s grave and bring her up to date on the latest headlines. Sisters come to Arlington with photographs of brothers now gone forever; girlfriends bring bouquets and balloons; someone hangs wind chimes in a dogwood, which ring with music when the limbs shiver. A marine’s parents drive down from Pennsylvania, unpack their lawn chairs, set them up in Section 60, and pass a spring afternoon with their son, recently killed in Iraq. They speak to his tombstone as if it is the most natural thing in the world. It is at Arlington, where other pilgrims do the same thing every day.
Do the tombstones speak back? Of course they do. Each one tells a story. The marker on James Parks’s grave, up in Section 15, speaks for a slave born at Arlington who found his freedom there, stayed on, and saw the world around him utterly transformed. In Section 3, a tombstone marks the resting place of Lt. Thomas Selfridge, a twenty-six-year-old Army pilot who fell to earth at nearby Fort Myer, where he helped inaugurate the age of aerial warfare. Just across the way in Section 8 lies Rear Adm. Robert E. Peary, the explorer who claimed the North Pole in 1909 but failed to credit his associate, Matthew Henson, the African American guide who got him there. Henson finally won recognition in 1988, when he was disinterred, conveyed to Arlington, and buried with high ceremony. Other tombstones speak for the Revolutionary War soldier who died at the hands of a mob while defending the First Amendment; of one-armed John Wesley Powell, explorer of the Colorado River; of one-legged Daniel Sickles, Civil War general, ambassador, congressman, scoundrel. Famous generals from Fort Myer—among them John J. Pershing, George C. Marshall, and Omar Bradley—walked among these tombstones in life, a sobering exercise even for non-generals, and returned to lie among them in death, surrounded by the men they sent into battle. Less prominent are the inhabitants of Arlington’s Section 27, where a sea of weathered stones preserves the memory of slaves and freedmen named George Washington, Robert Lee, Bertsey Murray, Selina Brown, Moses Jackson, and thousands of others, segregated in death as they had been in life. Like all of the dead at Arlington, they have stories to tell if you will listen.
New chapters are added daily, as new tombstones appear, twenty-five or so per day, five days a week, all year long. They continue the narrative of war, loss, growth, and remembering, which began long before there was any honor attached to burial at Arlington. That was when a promising colonel named Robert E. Lee lived in its cream-colored mansion, surrounded by a contingent of slaves and 1,100 acres of choice plantation land. If not for him, there would have been no Arlington National Cemetery.
PART I
DISUNION
1
LEAVING ARLINGTON
COL. ROBERT E. LEE FINISHED a fateful round of interviews and rode away from Washington, D.C., crossing the Long Bridge to Alexandria on April 18, 1861. It was a beautiful spring day, with the trees in young leaf and the Potomac River reflecting a benign sky, but there was no joy in Lee’s journey home. He had just turned down a major Army promotion, and now, headed back across the river, he struggled with a momentous decision: should he remain in the Army, which he had served faithfully for thirty-two years, or should he resign his commission to avoid the coming war, which threatened to break apart the country he loved?
The conflict between North and South, brewing for months, would trap Lee between his loyalties to the Union and allegiance to his family, his neighbors, and his home in Virginia, where the Lees had shaped events since 1641. “All the Lees had been Americans,” wrote Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee’s biographer, “but they had been Virginians first.”1
Lee brooded over these matters as he crossed the bridge that day, determined to stay with the Union if Virginia remained loyal, to leave if Virginia joined the growing list of southern states plunging toward rebellion. He hoped that some last-minute compromise would avert the conflict, but this was not to be: unbeknownst to Lee, a convention meeting in Richmond had voted to secede the day before and announced its decision at noon, as Lee made his rounds in Washington.2
The capital had already begun preparations for war. Workers on Pennsylvania Avenue piled sandbags on the piazza of the Treasury Building, where iron bars had been hastily plugged into the windows. Others sweated in the building’s dim basement, stacking barrels of flour for an expected siege. Union troops guarded the White House, newly occupied by President Abraham Lincoln. Next door at the War Department, government clerks mustered in the courtyard for volunteer duty, fumbling with unfamiliar weapons and adding to the city’s sense of doom. One lonely Navy sloop patrolled the Potomac River; from his office window President Lincoln could glimpse it bobbing like a clockwork toy in the distance. Women and children made plans to flee the city.3
This flurry of activity had been sparked when federal forces surrendered Fort Sumter to Confederates in South Caroli
na a few days before, prompting President Lincoln to call up 75,000 troops to defend the capital. Volunteers and regulars from Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Kansas answered his summons and began trickling into Washington as the spring season unfolded. They set up camp in the Capitol building, where they barricaded the doors with tubs of cement and slept on the floor of the old House chamber. Like the country itself, the building was a work in progress. The new House and Senate wings were not yet finished, and the Capitol’s truncated dome described an iron skeleton on the skyline. New troops patrolled the city’s thoroughfares and river crossings, set up artillery pieces, established their pickets, and scrutinized the Virginia hills for signs of trouble.4
Lee rode past them, crossed into Virginia, and turned up the road from Alexandria to Arlington, the 1,100-acre family estate dominating the rolling green landscape just beyond the river. The very sight of Arlington seemed to gladden Lee, who affectionately referred to the place as “our dear home” or “old Arlington” in correspondence.5 It was there, he said, “where my attachments are more strongly placed than at any other place in the world.”6 It was easy to see why: Arlington floated in the hills like a Greek temple, sheltered by old oaks and sprawling elms. Looking as if it had been there forever, it peered down from its eminence upon the raw, half-finished capital at its feet.
Although Lee’s father, Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee, had been a commanding presence in the formative years of the United States—a friend and comrade of George Washington, a hero of the Revolution, a governor of Virginia, a member of Congress, a champion of the Bill of Rights—he had left his son and family with very little aside from his legend. The elder Lee spent impetuously in land speculation, drew little income, and was finally imprisoned for debt. He fell into ill health. He abandoned the family for the West Indies, where he lived for several years. He was returning to Virginia in 1818, still broken and poor at age sixty-two, when he died at Cumberland Island, Georgia. His son Robert, who had been six when his father sailed away, was eleven when word of his death reached home.
On Hallowed Ground Page 1