Saluting Arlington Cemetery
1 Three million people visit Arlington National Cemetery each year to honor the 400,000 veterans (and their dependents) who are interred, inurned, or memorialized within its 639 acres. Arlington has the distinction of being the only national cemetery with service members from every major U.S. war and conflict.
2 The property belonged to George Washington Parke Custis, who was both the adopted grandson of our first president and the father-in-law of Robert E. Lee. His daughter Mary Custis Lee inherited the land, but when the Civil War broke out in 1861, the Lees abandoned their Arlington estate. The U.S. Army seized it to help defend the capital—then buried the North’s war dead there as a further insult to the Lee family.
3 Those early burials were racially integrated. But once Arlington became a national cemetery in 1864, all subsequent graves were segregated by race until Harry
Truman desegregated the military in 1948.
4 All presidents can be buried at Arlington, yet only two are: William Taft and John F. Kennedy. Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert is also at Arlington, despite his wishes to be buried beside his father in Springfield, Illinois. (Robert’s wife arranged his services and chose Arlington.)
5 Even though the cemetery conducts up to 30 funerals each day, Arlington isn’t keeping up with demand. Officials give priority to active service members over veterans and to military members over family members. The wait list is so long that months can pass between a death and the funeral.
6 Arlington does not charge for funeral services or for graves and their maintenance. The U.S. government also foots the bill for the white marble headstones that dot the landscape. Just before Memorial Day, soldiers place flags in front of the more than 200,000 headstones (as well as the urn niches).
7 In addition to service members, there are war correspondents, chaplains, and military doctors— such as yellow fever pathologist Walter Reed— laid to rest at Arlington as well. And since the Geneva Convention mandates that prisoners of war who die in captivity be honorably buried, the cemetery is also home to one German and two Italian POWS from World War II.
8 Among those buried at Arlington are boxer Joe Louis (an Army vet), actor Lee Marvin (a former Marine), and the architect of Washington, DC, Pierre Charles L’enfant (who joined the American Revolution). Glenn Miller, whose Army Air Force Band entertained more than a million
troops, has a memorial (since he is still MIA).
9 In 2013, Arlington launched a free mobile and web app, ANC Explorer.
The tool allows users to locate any grave at the cemetery and view burial records as well as photos of the headstones and memorials. The app also provides directions to each one.
10 More than 2,000 soldiers lie within the Tomb of the Civil War Unknowns. Inside the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier there are just three, one from each world war and another from the Korean War. An unknown Vietnam vet had been there as well, but a DNA test in 1998 revealed the soldier’s identity as Air Force first lieutenant Michael Joseph Blassie. Blassie was exhumed and reinterred in his home state of Missouri at his family’s request.
11 The guards of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier are also called sentinels. The guard on duty marches 21 steps down the mat behind the sarcophagus, waits 21 seconds, then turns and waits another 21 seconds before taking 21 steps back. This routine represents the highest symbolic military honor: the 21-gun salute.
12 Two of the memorials at Arlington are dedicated to astronauts.
Months after the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded in 1986, the commingled remains of all seven crew members were buried there. The memorial
Columbia is dedicated to the seven astronauts lost when that space shuttle exploded in 2003.
13 The cemetery is running out of room. About 95,000 burial spaces remain, but 22 million living armed forces members are currently eligible for them. Proposed restrictions to the rules of eligibility will severely limit who can be buried there
(far fewer retired vets, for instance), but they will allow for continued burials for the next
150 years.