Rest in Peace? Not at These Cemeteries

The Department of Veterans Affairs National Cemetery Administration earned high marks in a recent survey of customer satisfaction, but on the state level, it’s another story.

The VA cemetery in Exeter, Rhode Island, under the control of the Department of Human Services, incorrectly laid out a row of graves in 2010, and since then seven veterans were interred in the wrong place. Even when the

permanent grave markers were installed, the problem wasn’t noticed and markers were put in the wrong place on 21 graves. The mistake wasn’t found until recently, when cemetery workers tried to make space for a veteran’s wife, and there was no room in the grave.

Can you imagine? You visit the burial site of your loved one and later learn you were in the wrong place, year after year?

There apparently were no procedures in place to prevent this kind of mistake, but there will be now. A second person will need to verify that the remains are in the correct place.

It wasn’t the first mistake of this kind at the Rhode Island cemetery. One woman inquired about why the ground at her mother’s grave wasn’t freshly turned. It was discovered that the woman, the wife of a former state senator, had been buried a few rows down and a few spaces over, instead of with her husband. Explanation: human error. This is the same cemetery where piles of U.S. flags were discovered last year dumped like so much garbage, found and photographed by a son who came to pay his respects at his father’s grave.

It’s hard to pick out which veterans cemetery is the worst, but this one is right up there: In Texas, a veteran’s grave marker left off his middle name. The replacement marker had the word “united” misspelled, as in Uinted States of America.