Arlington marks 150 years as nation’s military burial ground

On Jan. 25, 1961, a special, lead-lined coffin was lowered into a 10-foot-deep grave reinforced with cement at Arlington National Cemetery.

The family of the deceased was told to stand back 20 feet during the service, as a precaution. When the prayers were over, more cement was poured in and the grave filled with earth.

The dead man was Army Specialist Richard L. McKinley, 27, who had been killed in an explosion at a nuclear reactor earlier that month. His body required careful handling.

In the rich lore of Arlington Cemetery — which marks the 150th anniversary of its founding today — McKinley’s burial, as recounted by news articles and historians, is one of the strangest.

Born amid the anguish of the Civil War, the cemetery had long held hallowed remains. This time they were radioactive, too.

This spring, Arlington has been marking its anniversary with special programs and commemorations. An evening musical tribute is scheduled for today, and a public wreath-laying at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is set for Monday.

Since 1864, when the bloodshed of the war was sending Washington more dead soldiers than it had graves for, Arlington has been the nation’s most celebrated military burial ground. Tens of thousands of military figures and others, of all ranks, have been laid to rest beneath regiments of white tombstones.

“Hither our children’s children shall come to pay their tribute of grateful homage,” Army general and future president James A. Garfield said at the cemetery on the nation’s first official Memorial Day in 1868, according to the National Park Service.

Over time, Arlington has been a place of national mourning, intimate grief and personal pilgrimage. It has been the venue for solemn memorial pageantry and great solitude.

It’s a quiet spot where the faint sound of taps, the distant crack of a rifle salute or the clip-clop of a horse-drawn burial caisson can drift on the spring breeze.

In the heat of summer, the air can be thick with the smell of cut grass. In winter, the wind whipping around the ancient oak and walnut trees can be fierce.

Separate communities

In some areas, there are communities of the deceased.

Section 60, in the southeast portion of the cemetery, has become the last resting place of service members killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a poignant meeting spot for friends and relatives.

Chaplains Hill, near the center of the cemetery, holds the remains of chaplains who served in four wars. There, among others, rests the Rev. Charles Joseph Watters, a Roman Catholic priest who was given the Medal of Honor posthumously after he was killed while ministering to the wounded in Vietnam in 1967.

In section 21, hundreds of military nurses are buried near the 8-foot marble Nurses Memorial. Gen. John J. Pershing is buried in section 34 overlooking manyof his World War I “doughboys” and beside his grandson, Richard, who was killed in Vietnam in 1968.

Although each of Arlington’s 400,000- plus graves mark the tragedy of death, the cemetery also serves as an index of American biography.

“The history of Arlington is really the history of our nation,” Stephen Carney, the cemetery’s command historian, said recently. “Any headstone you go to, if you start researching, you uncover these incredible lives.”

In a shady grove of trees is the grave of Dwight H. Johnson.

A draftee from Detroit, he was given the Medal of Honor at the White House in 1968 for a breathtaking feat of bravery during the Vietnam War. But he had seen the horror of bat- tle, had come home troubled and was shot and killed while trying to rob a store in 1971. He was 23.

Not far away, along a red brick path in a secluded stand of holly and hemlock trees, is the grave of Abraham Lincoln II, the beloved grandson of the assassinated president.

Young “Jack” Lincoln was a teenager when he died in London of an infection following surgery.

He originally was buried with his grandfather in Springfield, Ill. But on May 27, 1930, his mother quietly moved him to Arlington to rest with his father, Robert Todd Lincoln, a former Secretary of War, who had died four years before.

Jack’s name wasn’t added to Arlington’s massive pink granite Lincoln sarcophagus until 1984, after a researcher noticed the absence of the boy’s name and arranged for its addition, according to news reports at the time.

Elsewhere, more famously buried in the cemetery are slain President John F. Kennedy, his wife, Jackie, and his senator brothers Robert — who also was assassinated — and Edward.