In his second inaugural address, with the end of the Civil War in sight and barely six weeks before an assassin’s bullets would make him America’s martyr, Abraham Lincoln urged his fellow citizens “to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan …”
Ten months earlier, on May 13, 1864, 21-year-old Army private William Henry Christman of Lehigh, Penn., would be the first soldier to be buried in the new national cemetery people called Arlington.
For 146 years, Arlington National Cemetery has been a place of reverence and a place for remembering. Now, thanks to the relentless reporting of Salon’s Mark Benjamin, we know with sorrow and fury, after a seven-month investigation by the Army, that the remains of at least 211 of those eligible for burial in this hallowed spot were misidentified, misplaced or mislabeled.
This is Arlington National Cemetery. This is where the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II — whose 33 citations and awards included the Medal of Honor, and who personally killed at least 240 enemy soldiers — Audie Murphy, is buried. Here lie former Sgt. Joe Louis, the heavyweight champion of whom Jimmy Cannon wrote, “Joe Louis is a credit to his race — the human race,” as well as astronauts Christa McAuliffe, “Gus” Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Dick Scobee. The man they called the GI’s general, Omar Bradley, a young Navy lieutenant who would become president, John Kennedy, and another who would become chief justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren, all rest here.
Those names were known to millions. But there are 300,000 more at Arlington who are not famous but who shared in their youth a love of country and a living patriotism that summoned them to the service of their country. They come overwhelmingly from the ranks of the unpampered and the unprivileged.
Most of the 300,000 are known only to those who loved them — their mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, daughters and sons, and, of course, their spouses. They, the survivors, are the ones who come to visit the gravesite to connect, for consolation and a little comfort.
Instead of solace, because of the incompetence and indifference of the individuals in charge of the cemetery, those grieving got a hard punch in the stomach. They can no longer know for sure if the grave and the headstone they visited to pray and to reflect belongs to their fallen warrior or a stranger. The cemetery leadership — which between 2002 and 2009 spent $5.5 million in contracts allegedly to computerize the cemetery records, only to have the inaccurate records still on 3-inch-by-5-inch cards — has been relieved.
Let’s be blunt. This is not the equivalent of putting a man on the moon or plugging a hole in an oil well a mile underwater. This is not multitasking. This is a solemn mission but a straightforward task, to be performed with consideration and respect, of simply identifying the right person and then burying her or him in the right place with the right marker.
You cannot go to a political event without being told by speaker after speaker just how much we honor and owe those who wear the uniform and who defend the nation. Oh, yeah, well then how do you explain the mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Medical Center and the emotional abuse of surviving families at Arlington?
To his credit, Army Secretary John McHugh could barely conceal his own anger at the report on the failures at Arlington, for which his department is responsible. Let us resolve to keep the pressure on Congress and on the administration until Arlington National Cemetery is made once again a place of reverence and a place for remembering, where those entitled to rest there — and those who mourn them — are treated with respectful professionalism and personal gratitude.
— Mark Shields is one of the most widely recognized political commentators in the United States. The former Washington Post editorial columnist appears regularly on CNN, on public television and on radio. Click here to contact him.