As Arlington fills up, leave room for ‘most sacred group’
As a boy growing up in Miami, Sergio Abad yearned to escape. He later found purpose and a sense of belonging as a paratrooper in the Army Airborne. When the soldier went to war in 2007, he had already made clear that if the worst happened, his final resting place should be Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from the nation’s capital.
Abad got his sad wish. At 21, after he was killed in the mountain village of Wanat, Afghanistan, his ashes were inurned at Arlington alongside the remains of 400,000 kept there for eternity.
The Department of Veterans Affairs runs scores of other military cemeteries across the country. But Arlington, with its vaunted history dating to the Civil War, is rapidly filling up. There are up to 30 burials and inurnments each weekday, 10 every Saturday. There are more than 7,000 ceremonies annually for active duty servicemembers, veterans, retirees and their families, a pace that will leave Arlington full to capacity in about 25 years.
Those who fought beside Abad — as well as 2.5 million other Americans who served in the nation’s most recent wars — face being denied the option Abad earned by dying in combat.
That would be unfair, particularly for a generation that in many ways sacrificed as much or more than their predecessors. As members of America’s first allvolunteer force, these men and women were deployed repeatedly. They’ve earned a place, if they so choose, in the pantheon of the most revered.
Preserving an eternal option for the nation’s youngest warriors means hard choices about eligibility, particularly for ground burials (as opposed to urns placed above ground in a columbarium, or niche wall).
Right now, about 90% of ground burials are for military retirees, honorable people who might have never heard a shot fired in combat in decades of service.
The remainder of the ground burials are for troops who died on active duty — in combat, for example — or combat-decorated veterans and Purple Heart recipients.
Restricting ground burials to the second category, what the Army described in a recent, 71page report as “those most sacred groups of eligible veterans,” would extend Arlington as an active cemetery until well into the next century. Retirees would remain eligible for above-ground inurnment.
The study said this option might be the most feasible, acceptable and suitable. We agree.
It’s not an easy choice. The simple, white headstones that carpet the rolling hills of Arlington would be restricted to those who effectively served at “the tip of the spear.” While that is well and good, it must not be forgotten that those men and women could not do their difficult jobs without the vast number of career professionals who support them.
Even so, the image that millions of Americans take home from Arlington National Cemetery is of those who ventured into harm’s way and made the ultimate sacrifice.
Memorial Day marks this form of selflessness. The cemetery, in turn, must continue to receive into its grounds those who, as Abraham Lincoln said, “gave the last full measure of devotion.”