Here, every day is Veterans Day.
This is not a country that abides much ceremony, but Arlington National Cemetery is a powerful exception.
We remain a freewheeling, egalitarian republic, not long removed from such custom as spitting tobacco juice in the direction of any grand display of pomp and circumstance. Our presidential inaugurals resemble more circus parades than Roman triumphs or royal coronations. There is no ceremony of any kind attendant to the changing of the guard at the White House, a residence that in other nations might be called the Presidential Palace.
But on the slopes of this verdant, wooded hill across the Potomac in Virginia, on land that was once the private domain of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and the descendants of Martha Washington, ceremony is honored and exalted. America admits no aristocracy save one of heroes, and here they lie.
They’re ordinary people for the most part, made extraordinary through their service and sacrifice. As many as 15 times a day, the brooding stillness of this place is interrupted by the solemn intrusion of funerals, as another who served or sacrificed or was married to a veteran is brought to rest-and is ceremonially welcomed-at what the military call “the Bivouac of the Dead.”
At other times, tourists and schoolchildren move along the roadways or lanes past the fields of headstones in chattering groups or by ones and twos. Then they’ll come to a particular grave or memorial and stand still a moment and fall silent. There’s ample ceremony in that, even with the crowds who quietly jam together before the grave marker of President John F. Kennedy-and, as of last month, the one beside it belonging to Jacqueline, who died last summer.
The most profound hush falls upon the most sacred and symbolic site of honored American ceremony here or anywhere-the marbled terrace under which lie four veterans singular for their anonymity-Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknowns.
No trespass by foot or object is permitted on this stone square, whose cold embrace contains the remains of the Unknown Soldier of World War I and the Unknown Servicemen of World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War.
The solitary sentry who patrols this terrace with slow, measured pace-21 steps before pausing to gaze at the tomb for 21 seconds-does so on a rubberized carpet that respectfully muffles his footfalls. But when the guard is changed-on the hour every hour from Oct. 1 to March 31, every half-hour from April 1 to Sept. 30 and every two hours when the cemetery is closed at night-the snap and crack of rifle bolt and butt and sharply clicking heels echo over the hillside, and seemingly all over the city of Washington that stretches beyond from the banks of the river below.
One may not speak, and would not, during this ceremony. As the cemetery reminds, this is where the American people come to give thanks-silently.
More than 4 million people come here each year. The most visited shrines in the 612-acre cemetery are the Tomb of the Unknowns and, just to the south, the Kennedy graves. In addition to President and Mrs. Kennedy, the bodies of two infant Kennedy children are buried there. JFK’s assassinated brother, Robert, lies just around a curve of hill nearby, marked by a simple white cross.
But some 200,000 veterans and their dependents are interred here. Many are famous. All have a story.
Arlington is the second-largest U.S. military cemetery, after Long Island National Cemetery, but, established at the end of the Civil War, it is now four-fifths full. At the present rate, the limited burial space is expected to be exhausted about the year 2020.
Burial is open only to those who have died on active duty; who have served 20 years active duty or otherwise qualify for full retirement; holders of the Medal of Honor, Distinguished Service Cross, Air Force Cross or Navy Cross, Distinguished Service Medal, Silver Star or Purple Heart; and their spouses or minor children under 21.
JFK and William Howard Taft, who also served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, are the only presidents buried here, though any chief executive (as commander in chief) may be. Robert Kennedy’s burial was through special dispensation. Though a World War II veteran, he would not otherwise have qualified.
Medal of Honor winner Audie Murphy, who left the military a major, is at Arlington. Polar explorers and Adms. Richard Byrd and Robert Peary are here.
Gen. James Doolittle, leader of the famous carrier-borne 1942 bomber raid on Tokyo, is among many celebrated aviators at Arlington. So are 12 U.S. astronauts, including Virgil Grissom and Roger Chaffee, killed in the 1967 Apollo mission fire, and Dick Scobee and Michael Smith, victims of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. A monument to all seven members of the Challenger stands in the cemetery, too.
Another U.S. disaster, the 1898 explosion of the Battleship Maine that provoked the Spanish-American War, is memorialized with a high tower and the warship’s mast, which overlooks the graves of 229 sailors from the vessel. Until his recent reinterment in his native Poland, the body of famed pianist Jan Paderewski had been kept in a mausoleum in the base of the Maine memorial. He’d wanted to be buried in his native soil, but not until it was free.
Boxer Joe Louis, who served as an Army sergeant in World War II, is at Arlington, buried beneath a large marble stone that bears the words “The Brown Bomber” and the dates of his tenure as World Heavyweight Champion, 1937-1949.
Benjamin O. Davis, the first black general in the American military, and Daniel James, a combat pilot in World War II, Korea and Vietnam and the nation’s first four-star black general, lie here. So does slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, a veteran of the Normandy invasion.
It was not until 1948, when President Harry Truman issued the executive order desegregating the military, that African-American and Caucasian dead were buried among one another at Arlington.
Dr. Anita Newcomb Magee, who became the Army’s first woman surgeon during the Spanish-American War and founded the Army Nurse Corps in 1900, is among the honored dead here, as is Barbara Rainey, the first woman pilot in the U.S. Navy, killed at the age of 43 in a 1982 training accident.
Two famous actresses are in Arlington because they married military men: Constance Bennett, remembered as the daffy, blond, socialite wife of Cary Grant in “Topper” and real-life wife of Brig. Gen. John Coulter; and silent-screen star Fay Bainter, wife of Navy Lt. Cmdr. Reginald Verable.
Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Margariette Higgins, the only female combat correspondent in the Korean War, is here, though her grave is difficult to find. Legendary mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, a World War I nurse noted for crawling out into No Man’s Land a few yards from the German lines, is here, as is Dashiell Hammett, author of “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man” and the target of a notorious FBI investigation into his leftist activities. Hammett is buried at Arlington for his service as an overage volunteer sergeant in World War II.
Gen. John J. Pershing, the American supreme commander in World War I, lies here with only a simple grave marker among a field full of World War I veterans. Lt. Lewis Puller, author and son of Marine Corps legend Chesty Puller and a tragic figure badly maimed in the Vietnam War, lies here in a fresh grave as yet without a headstone after taking his own life earlier this year.
The large, pillared neoclassical mansion that looks down upon the fields of dead is in its own way symbolic of America’s history and wars.
When Martha Washington’s son by her first marriage died while serving with his stepfather George at Yorktown during the American Revolution, Martha took in two of the son’s four children to ease the burdens on his widow. One of these, George Washington Parke Custis, tried to buy Mt. Vernon after the deaths of George and Martha, but was rebuffed by a Washington family heir.
He moved upriver to a 1,100-acre plantation across from the fledgling Washington city and built Arlington House as his manor. His daughter, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, in 1831 married a brilliant young Army officer named Robert E. Lee, son of Revolutionary War hero Light Horse Harry Lee.
Lee made Arlington his home, calling it “a house you can see with half an eye,” but left it to serve with Virginia and the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War.
He was never able to return. Union troops seized it early on in the conflict and began using the land as a cemetery in 1865. As a further kick in the face to Lee and the Southern “cause” of slavery, the grounds of the estate also were used to house freed slaves, the so-called “contraband” of the war, as Union forces liberated them and sent them north.
The graves of many of these early freedmen are in an area near the first Civil War Union graves. Among the Civil War dead here are the very brave Gen. Philip Kearny, who lost his left arm in the Mexican War and then died fighting for the Union, and John Clem, the famous “Drummer Boy of Chickamauga,” who joined the Union Army as its youngest soldier at age 10, made sergeant at 11, and left the army a general at age 70, unsuccessfully seeking combat duty in World War I.
Though it was intended as a Union Army cemetery, Arlington began accepting the remains of War of 1812 and Revolutionary War veterans after its creation.
Indeed, the history of the country is represented here. Gen. George Crook’s grave has a stone carving commemorating his peace treaty with the Apache chief Geronimo. Not far from Constance Bennett’s grave is that of Indian War-era veteran Raymond Bonnin and his wife, Gertrude. The stone also bears her Native American name, “Zitkala-Sa, of the Sioux Indians.”
One’s most vivid impression of Arlington might well come standing on the lawn of Gen. Lee’s house (which was designated as a memorial to Lee in 1955), looking down from the lip of the hilltop to a sweeping vista that includes one of the most magnificent, all-seeing views of the capital imaginable.
Nearby, immediately to one’s right, is the elaborate grave and marker of the man who laid out the master plan of the capital, Pierre L’Enfant, who also served as an aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolution.
Down the lane to the left, in an old brick recess, is the very first grave dug on the property, that of Mrs. Lee’s relative Mary Randolph (1782-1827), who was also cousin of Thomas Jefferson, sister of Gov. Thomas Randolph of Virginia and a descendant of Pocahontas. Her son Burwell, a Navy midshipman, fell from a mast and was terribly crippled. His mother Mary, at great physical strain and cost to her health, nursed him for the rest of his life. Thus her epitaph, “victim to maternal love and duty.”
Across the river are the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. To the left of the Reflecting Pool is the Vietnam Memorial. To the right of the pool, work has begun on the long awaited Korean War Memorial.
Just down the hill, eerily bright in the dusky moments before sunrise and after sunset, is the eternal flame Mrs. Kennedy had installed to mark her husband’s grave, and that now also points the way to hers. Watching its flickering light from above, absorbing the peacefulness that is all around, one recalls that JFK visited this place twice in 1963, laying a wreath that Nov. 11-Armistice Day (as Veterans Day was then known)-just 11 days before his assassination.
On his visit here in the spring of that year, in the full bliss of that gentle season, he remarked, informally: “I could stay here forever.”
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Arlington is a stop on Washington’s Blue Metro line that runs to National Airport and is easily reached by car via the George Washington Memorial Parkway. There are no handicapped facilities on the cemetery grounds or in Arlington House, but the Tomb of the Unknowns is wheelchair accessible, as are the cemetery Visitors Center and the roadways that lead to the Kennedy graves. “Tourmobile” trips through the cemetery are available from the Vistors Center.
Persons wishing to find a specific grave at Arlington National Cemetery can do by so consulting locator books and maps at the Visitors Center. The cemetery is open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. October through March and 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. April through September. Arlington House is open 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. October through March and 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. April through September. For information, call 703-697-2131.
