New graves, fresh grief in Arlington Cemetery

By Darragh Johnson

updated 4:37 a.m. ET May 20, 2007

In Section 60, death remains too fresh to be separated from life.

You see it in the 17 cigars pushed into the grass near one headstone, signs that a combat unit stopped by.

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And in the mother who spent winter afternoons wrapped in a sleeping bag, stretched across her son's grave.

And in the older man who reads Robert Frost to the dead, knowing that their families live thousands of miles away.

Here in Section 60 are the graves of 336 men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan — almost one in 10 of the dead. Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom have produced the highest percentage of burials at Arlington National Cemetery from any war. For the duration of this war, there have been few photographs of coffins returning home. Section 60 is the one place to get a sense of the immensity of the nation's loss.

The great expanse of the cemetery is known for its orderliness, its precision. Each Memorial Day, the government places an American flag exactly one foot in front of every headstone. Only flowers are allowed on graves.

Messiness of life disrupts
But in "60," the messiness of life disrupts the order. Picnics are laid and incense burned. Red glass hearts are left atop the headstones. Origami-style sheets of notebook paper are tucked away, safe from lawn mower blades.

Mothers and widows, friends and regretful exes write intimate notes, some as casual as a message stuck on a refrigerator door.

"I called your old cellphone the other day. Someone named Brian has it now, and I couldn't help but wonder if he knew anything about you."

"It was so wonderful having lunch with you. Now that I know how easy it is to get here by Metro, I'll come by way more often."

Here, the deaths haven't been fully absorbed. People talk to their dead. They still see their dead. "Somebody drives by," says Linda Bishop, a few feet from the grave site of her son Jeff, "and you think it's him. You see him." The phone rings, says Xiomara Mena Anderson, standing over the grave of her son Andy, and "I always think it's him."

Other parts of Arlington wear the dignified repose of old age and bygone eras. Section 60 reverberates with youth and immediacy. Visitors wear long sideburns and spiky hair, flip flops and eyelet skirts.

Even the names on the headstones sound youthful and vibrant: Megan, Jesse, Heath, Blake. They are names that seem better suited to text messaging — LOL, BFF — than to the abbreviated code of the graveyard — CPL, BSM.

No comfort
"I find a need to be there," says Teresa Arciola, who drives from New York's Westchester County every other month to place iPod earbuds on her son's grave and play for him the Temptations and Eminem. She brings him Black Forest gummy bears and, on his birthday, beer that she pours into the ground. At every visit, she sits on his grave and reads aloud from his favorite baby book, "Corduroy." He had just turned 20.

"I feel good while I'm there," Arciola says. "But I don't think there's comfort."

The graves come quickly.

One mother visits the grave of her casualty officer, the man who was there for her when she first learned that her son had died in 2005.

The funerals require an extra level of choreography.

Two were held Wednesday, back to back. Overhead, thunderstorms threatened, the sky was the color of dark cement and the wind blew flower arrangements to the ground.

By the time the first man was buried — Maj. Douglas A. Zembiec, a 34-year-old Marine known as the Lion of Fallujah — the backhoe beside his grave had begun to dig for the next funeral. More than 50 mourners remained near Zembiec's grave site.

Some wandered, visiting other graves. A man in a dark suit sought out two other headstones. A Marine officer spent 20 minutes crisscrossing the section, stopping regularly.

And the backhoe continued to dig. Every mound of dirt scooped from the newest grave was used to finish burying the officer whose funeral had just ended. Rites for Army Spec. Matthew T. Bolar were to begin in an hour.

To stand at the edge of where the graves begin is to see exactly what the war has meant — what has been lost, what has been sacrificed. The headstones' dark, black lettering seems to endlessly repeat the vague circumstances of each death: Operation Iraqi Freedom . . . Operation Iraqi Freedom . . . Operation Enduring Freedom . . . Iraqi Freedom . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Enduring . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Iraqi . . . Enduring . . .

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