On that cool, crisp morning by the Mediterranean, a single suicide bomber crashed a yellow Mercedes-Benz truck laden with explosives into the Marine outpost near the city’s airport, producing a blast that the FBI described as the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War II. Equivalent to 12,000 pounds of TNT, the discharge collapsed the barracks, killing 241 service members, all part of the multinational peacekeeping mission to Lebanon; another 58 victims, most of them from French military services, died in a similar attack minutes later. The Marines, lightly armed and forbidden to take the high ground surrounding their position for fear of sparking a larger conflict, had been sitting ducks for the terrorist assault that day. They suffered 220 fatalities, more single-day losses than at any time since their fighting on Iwo Jima in 1945. Calling the Beirut massacre the saddest day of his presidency, President Ronald Reagan withdrew the Marine battalion from Lebanon three months later.16
By that time, many of those killed in the bombing had been brought back to Arlington for burial. Most of them—nineteen Marines and two sailors—were laid to rest alongside one another near Eisenhower Drive in Section 59 of the cemetery, where they were seen off to the strains of the Navy Hymn, a flourish of swords, and the high-precision ceremony of which the Marines are justifiably proud. True to their motto, Semper Fidelis, “always faithful,” the Marines have not forgotten the comrades lost in Beirut. A cedar of Lebanon, like the one depicted on that nation’s flag, was planted in Section 59 a year after the bombings; now the tree spreads its arms over the graves of the fallen. And even after a quarter century, comrades, friends, and family return to Arlington each year on the anniversary of the attack to read the names of the dead, salute the fallen, and consider the long chain of events the 1983 attack set in motion. “This loss is not in vain and we will not break faith with them in the tasks we have ahead,” said Marine Lt. Gen. Jan C. Huly, speaking at such a ceremony in 2003.“We did not know they would be the first casualties—among the first—in the war on terrorism.”17
The tragedy in Beirut convinced Osama bin Laden, then unknown to the larger world, that the United States could not withstand a drawn-out fight with determined opponents. In an interview with ABC News in 1998, the al-Qaida founder pointed to the Marines’ abrupt withdrawal from Lebanon as a sign of weakness in Americans “ready to wage cold wars but unprepared to fight long wars.”18 He was wrong about the Marines, who continue to suit up and go to work in a dangerous world, just as their comrades from other services have done since the Beirut bombing.
That suicide attack of 1983 set the pattern for the bloody years to follow—in the first bombing of the World Trade Center, which killed six in 1993; in the bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment building in Saudi Arabia, which killed twenty in 1996; in the coordinated bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, which killed 223 in 1998; in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, which killed seventeen in 2000. All, except for the World Trade Center assault of 1993, produced new casualties for Arlington; all followed the same tactical model; all were prelude to the September 2001 attacks, which brought the reality of asymmetric warfare forcefully home and prompted the deployment of U.S. forces to Afghanistan and Iraq.
This strange new war—waged on two fronts, under harsh conditions, against a backdrop of tribal antipathies—was unlike any conflict the United States had known before, a state of affairs illustrated by the war’s earliest combat casualty and the first to be honored at Arlington: not a uniformed soldier but a CIA officer, Johnny “Mike” Spann, killed in prison rioting in northern Afghanistan on November 25, 2001.19
Spann, a former Marine Corps captain, was a member of the CIA’s paramilitary Special Activities Division. He had been questioning suspected Taliban terrorists at a temporary prison near Mazar-e Sharif when hundreds of inmates staged an uprising and seized weapons from an armory maintained by the Afghan Northern Alliance, allies of the United States. A fierce firefight ensued, raging for most of three days. By the time the melee ended, hundreds of inmates and dozens of Northern Alliance soldiers had been killed. Among the dead was Spann, thirty-two, shot in each temple. Official government reports attributed the agent’s fatal wounds to the firefight, but after carefully examining his son’s body in a Virginia funeral home, Spann’s father believed that he had been dispatched execution-style. A detainee later transferred from Afghanistan to Guantánamo told FBI interrogators that Spann had sparked the rioting by shooting a prisoner who threatened him; another Guantánamo inmate suggested that Spann had been killed by friendly fire when the North Alliance sent in thousands of troops to quell the riot. Because of the confused struggle at Mazar-e Sharif and the spy agency’s reluctance to reveal details of its operations, the truth may never be known.20
Whatever the exact cause of Spann’s death, it was undeniable that he had fallen in the line of duty, which made him a candidate for hero status at home. Within the CIA his sacrifice is represented by a star carved into the marble wall of the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where Spann became the seventy-ninth officer so honored since the agency’s founding in 1947.21 And, despite the secrecy shrouding Spann’s work in Afghanistan, he was treated to an outpouring of public gratitude in a nation still shattered by the 9/11 attacks and eager for a decisive response.“He Died a Hero,” the New York Post proclaimed that November. “First Hero,” the New York Daily News declared, welcoming the dead agent back to the United States.22
Special provision had to be made for Spann’s funeral at Arlington, for, despite his eight years of Marine Corps service, he did not die in uniform and could not qualify for burial in the national cemetery. His family pressed for an exception. A home-state lawmaker, Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, took the request to the White House. George J. Tenet, director of Central Intelligence, endorsed the proposal, in part because the agent’s identity had already become known, in part because the CIA needed a boost after its failure to predict the 9/11 attacks. President George W. Bush signed a waiver for Spann’s burial at Arlington, where several hundred mourners gathered on December 10, 2001, to honor the first casualty of what promised to be a long and tangled conflict.23
“Those who took him from us will be neither deeply mourned nor long remembered,” Tenet told the crowd at Arlington. “But Mike Spann will be forever part of the treasured legacy of free peoples everywhere—as we each owe him an immense, unpayable debt of honor and gratitude. His example is our inspiration. His sacrifice is our strength. For the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency, he remains the rigorous and resolute colleague … the patriot who knew that information saves lives, and that its collection is a risk worth taking.”24
When Tenet was through, the Marines of Bravo Company, resplendent in their dress blues and white gloves, carried their former comrade’s flag-covered casket to the grave.25 Used to doing more with less, the Marines deploy a six-man casket squad of body bearers to Arlington, three to a side, instead of the eight assigned to casket teams from the other services. On this frigid day, they made it look graceful, hoisting Spann’s remains on their shoulders and marching him to a choice plot in Section 34, on the rolling knoll where Gen. John J. Pershing’s simple tomb commands a fine view of the capital. The graveside service concluded, Spann’s widow, Shannon, crossed over the grass, knelt by her husband’s plot, and quietly spoke a few words to him. She kissed her hand and touched it to the cold wood. Her father-in-law followed in her wake, keeping his eye on the grave, holding the couple’s six-month-old son, Jake, and speaking comfort to him, now fatherless and bundled against the December chill.26
Since Spann’s arrival at Arlington in 2001, almost 5,000 Americans have been killed in the fighting for Afghanistan and Iraq, a conflict that has added hundreds of new graves to the cemetery’s Section 60. It has been called the “saddest acre in America,” occupied by young service members who died long before their time.27 “You never get used to seeing the young ones die,” said Tom Sher
lock, a cemetery historian who has worked at Arlington for more than thirty years. “For the Greatest Generation, who account for most of our funerals, they’ve had the chance to live full lives. It’s never easy, but it seems natural. When you see a young wife holding her infant, and the young friends and family with her, well, that’s just a little harder. Like I say, you never get used to it.”28
It was a fine day in early May and Sherlock was between funerals, setting out little American flags at the graves of four sailors in Section 60, just a few strides away from the tomb of Army Capt. Russell B. Rippetoe, twenty-three, the first combat fatality from Iraq to be buried at Arlington. Like scores of others resting in orderly rows there, Rippetoe was killed by a suicide car bomb—the terrorist’s weapon of choice, along with the roadside bomb or improvised explosive device (IED). Manning a checkpoint near Hadithah, northwest of Baghdad, Rippetoe and other members of his company stopped a car on April 3, 2003, two weeks into the U.S. invasion. A woman emerged from the vehicle to plead for help: “I’m hungry and I need food and water!” Instinctively Rippetoe rushed toward her, just as a ball of fire exploded from her car. He and two other soldiers were killed in the blast, as were the woman and driver. Spec. Chad Thibodeau was knocked flat by the explosion that day, but he survived, drifting in and out of consciousness as he heard medics working over Rippetoe and the others, to no avail.29
Severely injured, Thibodeau was transferred for treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. He was still in the hospital when he learned about Captain Rippetoe’s funeral, scheduled for April 10, 2003. When the day arrived, Thibodeau scrambled out of bed, hitched a ride across the river, and found his way to Arlington, intent on paying homage to a respected officer. Laboriously maneuvering his wheelchair onto the soft ground in Section 60, Thibodeau got mired, struggled up from his chair, and limped the rest of the way to Rippetoe’s grave, where he heard an Army chaplain offer up some particularly fitting scripture. “Be strong and of good courage,” said Lt. Col. James May. “Be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed, for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest.” The verse, from the first chapter of Joshua, had been well known to Captain Rippetoe, who had it engraved on the reverse side of his dog tag, which was found on his body and returned to his parents.30
The bombings would continue in Afghanistan and Iraq, setting others on the path to Arlington, where Sfc. Robert A. Durbin of the Army’s Old Guard saw hundreds of men and women into their graves. Durbin, a career noncommissioned officer with fifteen years’ experience, was leader of an honors casket team, one of the specialty squads contributing to Arlington’s reputation for highly refined ritual. Durbin made sure that his squads carried their caskets on the level, that they folded their flags tight and straight, and that their final salutes were rendered with snap and precision—all antidotes, perhaps, to the messy circumstances of the outside world that had brought so many of the dead to Arlington.31
Durbin was all too familiar with the chaotic nature of life outside. Reassigned from his Old Guard duties, Durbin had been deployed—and redeployed—to Iraq as a sergeant in combat. He had learned to survive in the war zone, where random violence and sudden death were daily occurrences. But one particularly bloody episode from his third tour burned itself into Durbin’s memory, setting him on what seemed like a quixotic one-man crusade to change the rules for honors ceremonies at Arlington.32
It happened on February 8, 2008. Four members of the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from the army’s 25th Infantry Division were on patrol near Taji, a rural area in the volatile Sunni Triangle, northwest of Baghdad. The patrol’s light armored vehicle hit a powerful IED buried under the road. It blew the vehicle apart in a shower of dust and debris. Called to the scene with members of his platoon, Durbin helped pull mangled soliders from the wreckage. He found Staff Sgt. Jerald Allen Whisenhunt, thirty-two, already dead. The dead man had entertained dreams of returning to Hawaii after the war, where he looked forward to watching the next Super Bowl with his wife, Betsy, and their daughter, Alyson.33 “Tell Aly I will take her to the zoo and anywhere else she wants,” Whisenhunt had written in a final e-mail message home.34 Now he went into a body bag. Durbin stared into the dead soldier’s eyes before they took him off, “a burning image that won’t go away.” A few days later, when Durbin learned that Whisenhunt was bound for a funeral at Arlington, he began to fume. “All I could think of was how his funeral would go.”35
By all accounts, it was a beautiful service, conducted on February 21, 2008. A casket team soberly glided across the grass with Whisenhunt’s casket held high; the firing party rendered a flawless three-volley salute; Betsy Whisen-hunt tearfully accepted the folded flag from an officer; Taps settled over a knot of mourners in Section 60 to mark a young warrior’s passing. Any outsider would have been moved and impressed by the standard-honors funeral, which was more memorable than the farewell most civilians received. But it was far less than Whisenhunt would have rated as an officer or an enlisted man of E-9 rank—and that was the distinction that ate at Durbin. As an old Arlington hand with years of funeral experience, Durbin believed that enlisted men such as Whisenhunt who died in combat deserved the same full-honors treatment that officers rated at Arlington, which included all of the standard honors (a casket team, a folded flag, a firing party, and a bugler) plus the treatment accorded only to officers and top-ranked enlisted personnel—a military band, a marching platoon, a color-bearer, and a caisson.36
“Honors rendered should be rendered fairly, based on actions, not rank,” Durbin told Military Times newspaper, setting off a controversy that would simmer for months.37 “This is flat out disgraceful,” Durbin said. “A 2nd Lieutenant can die in a car accident 2 days after graduating Officer Candidate School and get a Full Honor Funeral, while a Master Sergeant in the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, or Navy with 22 years of Service can die in Combat in Afghanistan or Iraq, receive a Silver Star for Valor, and receive a Standard Honor Funeral.”38 The unequal treatment at Arlington was a form of segregation, Durbin said, overlooking the cemetery’s long tradition of isolating its graves by rank and race, a practice maintained until halfway through the twentieth century.
In a military culture where hierarchy was necessary and rank had its privileges, Durbin’s plea on behalf of enlisted soldiers took more than a year to gain traction. After a blizzard of letters and e-mails to the president, senators, news outlets, veterans’ groups, and military brass, Durbin’s appeals finally reached the office of Pete Geren, secretary of the Army, who bought the sergeant’s argument. Geren issued new regulations granting full-honors funerals for enlisted soliders killed in action. His directive, announced on December 12, 2008, took effect on January 1, 2009.39
“Arlington National Cemetery is an expression of our nation’s reverence for those who served her in uniform, many making the ultimate sacrifice,” Geren said. “Arlington and those honored there are part of our national heritage. This new policy provides a common standard for honoring all soliders killed in action.”40
Geren’s decision surprised and elated Durbin, who was still serving at Camp Tali in Iraq when the announcement came through. “First time in thirteen months over here I’ve had something to smile about,” he told the officer who informed him of the policy shift.41 It applied only to army personnel but set the precedent other services were expected to follow at Arlington, making the nation’s cemetery a bit less rank-conscious and a bit less elitist, continuing the trend that General Pershing’s arrival at Arlington had set in train more than half a century before.
The first soldier to be buried under the new rules was Army Spec. Joseph M. Hernandez, twenty-four, killed in Zabul Province of Afghanistan on January 9, 2009. The manner of his death was depressingly familiar: He and two other soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 4th Infantry Regiment, had been driving near Jaldak when their armored Humvee was blown up by a roadside bomb, killing all three in the vehicle.42
On the day this happened, his w
ife, Alison Hernandez, staying with relatives in Dyer, Indiana, sensed that something was wrong. Her husband phoned every other day from Afghanistan but had missed the last scheduled call. Feeling ill and fearing the worst, she was standing on the front porch when the two soldiers pulled up and emerged from a government car, looking grim. One of them was a chaplain. “I heard her scream from the porch,” her father, Robert Gordon Jr., said. “I got up and she fell through the door. ‘He’s gone,’” she said.43
A few days later, on January 23, Alison Hernandez was sitting in the front row at Arlington by her husband’s open grave with their sons, Jacob, two, and Noah, nine months. A cold wind whipped over Section 60 that day as more than a hundred mourners gathered for services. Hernandez was brought to his grave in a silver hearse, his widow having decided, for the sake of a timely burial, to forgo the horse-drawn caisson to which he was entitled but which would not be available for several weeks, because of a tightly packed funeral schedule. The weather also conspired against the family. Instead of a full military band, Hernandez was led to the grave by a single Army drummer, whose solemn cadence seemed all the more poignant for being solo. The subfreezing temperature, which iced up musical instruments, kept the Army band away from the service. Despite this, a single bugler, bundled in a heavy coat with his ear flaps deployed, stood tall among the white tombstones waiting for the last crack of the rifle salute for Specialist Hernandez. Then the bugler sent Taps ringing clear and true over the cemetery, at once lamenting the loss of a young warrior and welcoming a new recruit for Arlington.44
On Hallowed Ground Page 32