On Hallowed Ground (39 page)
Read On Hallowed Ground Online
Authors: Robert M Poole
WHEN NIGHT CAME to arlington, the crowds scattered, the cemetery gates clanked shut, and Old Glory was ceremoniously lowered
in front of the Lee mansion. Silence settled over the dark hills. Yet the workday continued on the amphitheater plaza, where
a lone sentinel marched slowly back and forth in the moonlight, keeping vigil at the Tomb of the Unknowns as Army guards have
done since round-the-clock watches began in 1937.
Even though no spectators were present, the sentinel followed a painstaking routine, patrolling the terrace with soldierly
precision. He marched twenty-one steps to the south, stopped, and pivoted to the east with a sharp click of his heels. Standing
rigid, he held this position for a count of twenty-one seconds. Then, with another heel click, he wheeled a half turn, shifted
his M-14 rifle from one shoulder to the other, and resumed patrol. He stepped exactly twenty-one paces to the north before
turning and halting to face the capital once more. Back and forth he marched on a frosty December night, repeating the process
until his one-hour duty was finished and another guard relieved him.
1
Like other Arlington traditions, this one was steeped in symbolism. The sentinel’s twenty-one-step pace and his twenty-one-count
pauses were based on the twenty-one-gun salute, the highest honor the military can render. He wore heavy heel taps, which
rang on the stone terrace, recalling the jangling spurs of cavalry troopers who once patrolled these heights. He kept his
rifle facing away from the sarcophagus and toward the amphitheater on each pass. This showed that he was ready to defend the
Unknowns from outside threats. He packed a 9mm Beretta on his hip and looked prepared to use it. His face, devoid of expression,
was as hard and cold as the granite under his feet.
2
“Even out here at night it’s hard mentally and it’s hard physically,” said Spec. Bruce Bryant, pausing to watch a fellow sentinel
marching back and forth in Battle Dress Uniform (BDU), the camouflage fatigues guards wear during night patrol, saving their
flawless dress blues for daytime duty. “Even with no one watching, it’s very tense,” Bryant said. “You hit your marks, you
make your turns, you try for perfection—even if it’s at three in the morning. You don’t want to do anything to disgrace the
Unknowns.”
3
“Why?” a visitor asks. “Who would know?”
“He would know,” Bryant said quietly, nodding toward the sarcophagus. His comment, startling at first, proved to be not at
all unusual for a Tomb Guard. Living with the Unknowns night and day, the sentinels soon speak of their dead comrades as if
they were present. They imagine the faraway battles that brought them to Arlington. They develop a strong affection for the
dead men they are meant to protect.
4
When Lt. Michael Blassie was removed from the Vietnam Unknown’s crypt in 1998, one of those mourning his departure was Cpl.
Mark Travis, a Tomb Guard who had spoken to the dead airman during night patrols and had taken time for a private goodbye
before Blassie was disinterred and driven away. “I was just so sad to see him go. I miss him,” said Travis, who left Arlington
a few weeks after Blassie did.
5
Tomb Guards spare no effort to honor the memory of those under their care. They keep to a firefighter’s schedule, working
twenty-four-hour shifts, eating, sleeping, and training in the tidy underground quarters beneath the amphitheater where they
are billeted a few hundred feet from the Unknowns. In their subterranean warren, the guards practice their twenty-one-step
walk to the beat of a metronome, stand in front of full-length mirrors to practice heel clicks and rifle drills, and spend
hours polishing their shoes, steam-pressing their own uniforms, and measuring the alignment of their medals to 0.64 of an inch. It would be unkind to suggest that their approach to work is obsessive-compulsive, yet far too mild to describe them as merely meticulous.
6
When a sentinel suits up for a daytime appearance on the terrace, he or she is assisted by another sentinel, who functions
as a dresser, making sure that the gold band on the duty guard’s hat is perfectly parallel with the top of his head and that
the yellow stripe of his trousers is exactly perpendicular to the floor.
7
His uniform must be free of lint and loose threads, which are dispatched with sticky tape and cigarette lighters, respectively.
One young guard, preparing for a late afternoon patrol (which in the argot of sentinels is a BOLO, or to “be on the lookout”),
blows fugitive dust from his shoes with a blast of air from a compressor, wriggles into a rubberized corset that flattens
his stomach, pulls on a fresh white shirt, squares his tie exactly, slides into his coat (which the Army calls a blouse),
and cinches himself in with a blue belt bordered with gold braid. The dresser yanks the sentinel’s blouse down tight from
behind, pulls it free of wrinkles, makes a final check for imperfections, and sends his comrade out to greet the public with
a word of advice:
“Don’t forget your dead-man’s face!”
At that instant, an apple-cheeked youth becomes a marble man, gliding up the stairs from the catacombs and into the light,
ready for his BOLO.
8
“We take it one step further because we are so visible,” said Staff Sgt. Adam L. Dickmyer, one of three relief commanders
for the Tomb Guard. “Thousands of people see us every day—more come here than go to the Jefferson Memorial—so we want to make
the best possible impression. And we want the guys who sacrificed everything to know that they are still remembered, that
someone still cares. That’s why we do it.”
9
Arlington remains the last refuge for these nameless warriors. It’s where their memories live on long after the guns have
fallen silent and the smoke has cleared away. The cemetery also provides a home for the ones who once were lost but now are
found.
Such was the case for Pvt. Francis Z. Lupo of Cincinnati, who had vanished without a trace near Soissons, France, in the summer
of 1918. Lupo, twenty-three, a member of the Army’s 18th Infantry Regiment, had fallen in the first day of fighting in the
Second Battle of the Marne, which many consider to be the turning point of World War I. Hastily buried in a bomb crater, Lupo
rested undisturbed there until 2003.
10
Then a French archaeologist, conducting a salvage survey in advance of construction projects, discovered the bones of two
people, recognized parts of old army uniforms from the Great War, and turned his find over to the Defense Department’s Joint
POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.
11
One set of bones was so diminutive that anthropologists initially thought that they belonged to a woman. But when other clues were considered, they pointed to Lupo. The teeth matched most elements of Lupo’s dental record; the private was short, probably less than the regulation height of five feet; and a tattered wallet had been recovered—with Lupo’s name stamped on it. Part of a size 5 ½ army boot, undoubtedly Lupo’s, was found with the bones. All suggested that a soldier presumed dead since July 20, 1918, might finally come home from the war. But what of the other combatant found with Lupo? To separate the remains, both sets of bones were subjected to mitochondrial DNA tests. One set of bones matched the mtDNA sample from Lupo’s teeth, so those remains were collected into one group, while the others were retained for further investigation.
12
With Lupo’s identification in hand, the Army began searching for his next of kin, eventually locating Rachel Kleisinger, a
niece born a dozen years after Lupo’s death, in Kentucky. Although Mrs. Kleisinger had never laid eyes on her uncle, she had
seen his picture, lit candles for him at church, and watched his mother, Anna Lupo, mourn his loss until the day she died
in 1949. It was always the same: Mrs. Lupo, a tiny Sicilian woman in black, would open the window of her Cincinnati house
and summon Francis:
“Sciue-ducce! Sciue-ducce! ”
she shouted to the neighborhood, using the nickname for her “Sweet,” as if she expected him to answer.
13
Everyone who had known Private Lupo was dead by the time they brought him to Arlington for burial on September 26, 2006. Mrs.
Kleisinger, then seventy-three and confined to a wheelchair, sat front and center at the Old Post Chapel of Fort Myer, accompanied
by her daughter and grandchildren. Lupo’s immediate kin had disappeared, but his military family remained. They turned out
more than a hundred mourners to honor one of their own. Sgt. Maj. John Fourham, the ranking noncommissioned officer from the
Army’s 1st Infantry Division, Lupo’s old unit, flew in from Fort Riley, Kansas, to pay his respects; ordinary soldiers in
working BDU fatigues crowded into the back pews, as did civilian scientists from the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory,
who had helped solve Lupo’s case. Two officers from the French army filed down the aisle, shoulders squared and caps tucked
reverentially under their arms, heel taps ringing on the chapel’s red tiles.
14
“I thought it was a mistake when I got the information about today’s service,” a priest admitted to the assembled mourners.
“How could we be burying a soldier from World War I after all this time? The fact that we are here today, brothers and sisters,
is a miracle. Now we know where he will be buried. Now we can say a little prayer at his graveside.” This they did, following
the priest and Lupo’s flag-covered casket out into the sunlight and down through the hills to Section 66, just to the east
of Eisenhower Drive, where a casket team from the Old Guard marched Lupo to the grave for the familiar rituals of parting.
The priest opened his book and said a prayer; the firing party cracked out its salute; the casket team carefully folded the
flag; Mrs. Kleisinger took it with her head held high. A few tears were shed for the private nobody knew but all remembered.
15
“It is so amazing to know that this soldier was so young,” said Sgt. Maj. Frederic Plautin, one of the French officers attending
Lupo’s service. “Many French died in battle with him the same way, but they were in France. This American soldier was not
in his country. So we really wish to share the grief and express our thanks for what he has done.”
16
All around the Frenchman, the white tombstones stretched out of sight, up through the dappled hills and down to the shining
river, thousands for Lupo’s war, thousands more for all of the others. With the ravages of age and with new conflicts adding
five thousand to six thousand new graves to Arlington each year, would the cemetery run out of space?
17
“We’ll have room for another fifty years,” said John C. Metzler Jr., the cemetery superintendent, who has overseen what is
likely the last expansion of Arlington. Slated to take effect over the next decade, the extension will add more than 70 acres
to the cemetery, bringing the total to some 680 acres, space enough for burials and inurnments into 2060.
18
“I won’t be here,” Metzler said. “But Arlington will be here.”
19
For all of the dead at Arlington,
Requiescant in pace.
For all of the living, a line of wisdom from an army chaplain who has buried hundreds of comrades
at Arlington:
“Life is short. Live it well.”
The idea for this book came from my friend and agent Raphael Sagalyn, who is patient only up to a point. He listened to my
long list of inappropriate and unmarketable ideas until he could stand it no longer. “Arlington National Cemetery!” he blurted.
“Why don’t you do a book on Arlington? It is a great subject.”
Several years and many funerals later, here it is, Rafe, with thanks for the gift of a story peopled with so many memorable
characters and so much historic interest that the great challenge has been to keep Arlington down to manageable size. Much
has been cast to the wayside, but I trust that enough remains to do justice to a worthy subject.
If I have succeeded in this, it is because so many kind people have guided the way. They include: Laura Anderson, Karen Byrne
Kinzey, Mary Troy, and Kendall Thompson of the National Park Service, which manages Arlington House, the Robert E. Lee Memorial,
as a national historical site. Their library, situated across Sherman Drive from the old Lee mansion, is an outstanding repository
of archival material on Arlington estate, the family who lived there, and the cemetery’s tumultuous early years.
From the Army’s Old Guard, the 3rd U.S. Infantry at Fort Myer, Virginia, thanks to Col. Robert Pricone, Sgt. Jason Cauley,
Sgt. Brian K. Parker, and Sgt. Jeremy A. Kern for taking the time to educate me about their work at Arlington. Sfc. Robert
A. Durbin, a former casket team leader for the Old Guard, answered my queries about Arlington and kept me apprised of his
campaign to change funeral regulations while he was deployed to Iraq. Kenneth S. Pond and other retired members of the Old
Guard provided a wealth of new material on the funeral of President Kennedy. I am also obliged to former and present sentinels
who allowed me to keep vigil with them at the Tomb of the Unknowns by day and by night: Sgt. Bruce Bryant, Sgt. Christopher
Moore, Staff Sgt. Stephen Kuehn, Staff Sgt. Adam L. Dickmyer, and Staff Sgt. Justin E. Bickett. Special thanks to Kim Bernard
Holien, Army historian for Fort Myer and Fort McNair, who patiently and generously guided my research.
One seldom gets a chance to say this, but I was happy to be a taxpayer each time I went to the National Archives for research.
Jill Abraham steered me to dusty boxes of papers from the Meigs era in Washington, D.C., while Timothy K. Nenninger, chief of modern military records at the facility in College Park, Maryland, proved that
his reputation for being a knowledgeable and enthusiastic partner in research is well deserved. At the Library of Congress,
thanks to Thomas J. Mann, reference librarian in the main reading room, and to Jeffrey M. Flannery, reference specialist in
the manuscript division.
The story of Arlington often led to Capitol Hill, where historians helped me sort through the many-layered legislative history
of my subject. Thanks to Beth Hahn, Chris Cochrane, and especially Zoe Davis of the Senate Historical Office; also to Ora
Branch in the office of the clerk, House of Representatives, for providing documents and guidance.
I am also grateful to Judith Knudsen, manager of the Virginia Room, Arlington Country Public Library; E. Lee Shepard, director
of manuscripts and senior archivist, Virginia Historical Society in Richmond, Virginia; Leith Johnson and Jennifer Miglus,
special collections and archives, Wesleyan University Library, Middletown, Connecticut; Elizabeth Dunn, research services
librarian, rare book, manuscript, and special collections library, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Rebecca Cooper,
manager of reader services, Society of the Cincinnati, Washington, D.C.; Vaughan Stanley, research librarian, special collections, Washington & Lee University, Lexington, Virginia; Robert C. Peniston, archivist, Custis Lee Papers, Washington & Lee University; Kelly D. Barton, archivist, Ronald Reagan Library, Simi Valley, California; David Clark, archivist, Harry
S. Truman Library, Independence, Missouri; Stephen Plotkin, reference archivist, John F. Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts; Arthur Link III, acting director, library and archives, Woodrow Wilson Library, Staunton, Virginia; Luther
Hanson, U.S. Quartermaster’s Museum, Fort Lee, Virginia; Douglas V. Johnson II and Richard Sommers, U.S. Army Heritage and
Education Center, Carlisle, Pennsylvania; Bill McKale, director, 1st Infantry Museum, Fort Riley, Kansas; Andrew Woods, historian,
1st Division Museum, Wheaton, Illinois; and Michael Rhode, historian, Army Medical Museum, Walter Reed Army Medical Center,
Washington, D.C.
The men and women of the Armed Forces Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command ( JPAC) at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu deserve
special praise for their efforts to locate, repatriate, and identify fallen service members from America’s wars. In 2006,
I joined them on a mission to Laos, where we recovered the remains of Capt. Michael J. “Bat” Masterson, an Air Force pilot
missing since 1968. Since Masterson was not buried at Arlington, he does not appear in this book, but it was on that assignment
that I met Troy Kitch, then deputy director of public affairs at JPAC, who subsequently helped me piece together the story
of Lt. Michael J. Blassie in Chapter 14. Thanks to Troy and to his former JPAC colleagues Johnie Webb, Robert Mann, and Thomas
Holland, all of whom contributed valuable insights and new information. Lieutenant Blassie’s sister, Air Force Col. Patricia
S. Blassie, unhesitatingly shared family documents and made time for a several interviews despite a busy schedule. Thanks
also to Ted Sampley, publisher of the U.S.
Veteran Dispatch
in Kinston, North Carolina; to John O. Marsh Jr., former secretary of the Army; and to Rudy deLeon, who headed the Pentagon
investigation of the Blassie case, leading to the airman’s disinterment. DeLeon, now senior vice president for national security
and international policy at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., helped make sense of a tangled and often emotional piece of recent history.
For many years now, Arlington has set the standard for other cemeteries in the national system. My thanks to Superintendent
John C. Metzler Jr., who maintains that standard. He drove me around the cemetery, settled points of history, took time for
interviews, and provided unfettered access to Arlington and its remarkable cast of employees. Two of these, Kaitlin Horst
and Darrell Stafford, were especially helpful, despite the demands of their daily schedules.
Betsy Whisenhunt, whose husband was killed in Afghanistan and buried at Arlington in 2008, instantly and kindly answered my
queries about the late Staff Sgt. Jerald Allen Whisenhunt, providing me with his last correspondence from the war zone. “Just
let everybody know what a great guy he was,” she explained.
To Carey Winfrey, editor-in-chief of
Smithsonian
, Thomas A. Frail, senior editor, and other colleagues at the magazine, thanks for the steady assignments—and for the friendship—that
kept me going while this book was under construction.
I am indebted to Geoffrey C. Ward and Ernest B. Furgurson, faithful friends who read the manuscript and saved me from numerous
mistakes and many embarrassments. Any flaws remaining are mine alone.
George Gibson, publishing director of Bloomsbury/Walker, understood the book’s appeal from our first conversation and patiently
prodded me forward. He never wavered in his support or enthusiasm. Sincere thanks to him and to his colleagues Jacqueline
Johnson, Margaret Maloney, Jeremy Wang-Iverson, Peter Miller, and Mike O’Connor.
Finally, my greatest debt, thanks, and love to my wife, Suzie, who has heard enough Arlington stories for a lifetime but pretends
to be hearing each one for the first time.
