Keeping a Promise to Fallen Comrades

There once was a time when, whether you died on the battlefield at 23 or of cancer at 80, whether you were a private or a general, the military would make every effort to send a flag and an honor guard to your graveside.

No longer.

Even as more U.S. veterans die each day than ever before, base closures and budget cuts have brought an end to most military honor guards.

Last year, fewer than 20,000 of the 540,000 veterans who died had active-duty honor guards at their funerals. Hundreds of thousands more were laid to rest with only a tape-recorded rendition of taps.

Into the breach have stepped veteran volunteers, most of them closer to death than to youth themselves, all determined not to let die a tradition that dates to the Civil War. They come to take care of their own--in the hope that someone will do the same for them.

Week in and week out, they drive hundreds of miles from retirement homes to spend hours standing at attention around flag-draped caskets at one funeral after another, often leaning on crutches, canes or each other.

They bury up to 11 of their comrades a day, to the mournful calls of bugles, all to deliver on a promise the military can no longer keep.

They seek donated blanks and buy their own vintage rifles to fire 21-gun salutes.

They stuff their stiff, aging limbs into uniforms they pay for themselves. And they head to the cemeteries.

Mostly in their 70s, they fear their ranks will diminish some day.

“We’re all getting ready to see our maker, and most of us were told when we came in that we’d have military honors when we died,” said Hal Camp, 80, a World War II veteran. He leads Orange County’s volunteer honor guard--among the first such groups in the nation--at Riverside National Cemetery, where more veterans were buried last year than at all but one cemetery in the country.

“There’s only so many people and so much money,” Camp said, “so it’s up to the veterans to take care of themselves.”

Since veterans from as far as Santa Barbara and San Diego started making regular trips to Riverside two years ago, they have attended the funerals of about 1,100 veterans. In 1997, volunteer groups around the country buried 10,000 veterans with military honors.

That represents only a fraction of those who deserved an honor guard and didn’t get one, Camp said.

A Feeling of Betrayal

Veterans have volunteered to lead military funerals, especially in areas far from military bases, since the Civil War. But it’s only in recent years, they said, that they have been forced to take responsibility for the vast majority of dead comrades who are honored. Nowhere have so many veterans joined together to fulfill this task than at Riverside, where hundreds of volunteers are answering the call.

Ten years ago, most military bases had active duty servicemen and women whose job was to serve as honor guards.

But in the last decade, 77 of the 495 major military installations on U.S. soil have shut down, dramatically shrinking both the ranks of active duty military personnel and of honor guard details.

At the same time, the number of dying veterans is climbing--including an estimated 36,000 World War II veterans each month. In 1989, an estimated 456,000 veterans died. In 1999, that number is expected to reach 561,000.

“You want to do it for everybody, you want to do everything you can, but we just can’t support it any other way,” Army spokeswoman Shari Lawrence said. “We’re not hiding anything. We just can’t do it anymore. . . . We’re trying to work through it any way we can.”

Not content just to step in at the funerals themselves, aging former soldiers--and families of the dead--are launching a new battle, a fight to force the military to make good on its pledge.

“When my mother and my brothers and myself went to make the prearrangements for my father’s funeral just a few days before he passed away, we were told that he was entitled to military honors, but that all there was money for was a rendition of taps on a cassette tape,” said Sherry VanLandingham, 41, of Fredericksburg, Va. Her father, Korean War veteran Joseph Windsor, died of lung cancer last year at 70.

“When I heard this . . . I got really angry because he always raised us to believe you got what you deserved. But he deserved this, and they were telling us no. I knelt by his bed and I spoke to him about it, and he was upset, too. He was so sick, but you could still see his pride, and you could see he felt betrayed. He said, ‘It’s not right. It’s just not right.’ ”

VanLandingham didn’t let the matter rest. She took her father’s case to Sen. Paul S. Sarbanes (D-Md.), who made certain a military honor guard was at the funeral.

In March, Sarbanes and two other senators introduced legislation to require the military to provide honor guards, upon request, at the funerals of veterans.

Veterans are lobbying in favor of the bill, but the legislation is being opposed by the Defense Department, which says that although no institution has more interest in honoring veterans, military honor guards are impractical in an era when so many veterans are dying.

Because of the number of hours the honors demand, military authorities say that reinstituting them could jeopardize national security.

“It may seem like sniveling and everything, but with a smaller military we have a tough enough challenge to achieve the missions required for national security, the deployments that are ongoing throughout the world,” said Lt. Col. Tom Begines, a Defense Department spokesman

“In order to do that, we’ve got to maintain readiness. We’ve got to train. We’ve got to do all the things that you would expect service members to do. So it’s wrenching, it is absolutely wrenching for us to realize that we just can’t do it all.”

The need for honor guards is particularly acute in California, home to many of the nation’s 6.7 million surviving World War II veterans, and where military budget cuts have hit hard.

“It’s a shame, really terrible,” said Joan Garifo of Villa Park, whose father, A. Joseph Garifo, died of a heart attack this month at 64. If not for a volunteer honor guard, the U.S. Army veteran would have gone to his grave without the salute, the bugle call and the military pomp he and his family expected.

“It meant so much to us . . . but why these men had to come out and do this when the military should, I don’t understand,” Garifo said. “I just think that for the men who stood up for our country, it’s the least that our taxpayers should do.”

A Legacy Written in Blood

Thelma Mae Brown, 90, of San Diego, buried her son, Byron King Jones Jr., this month after the Vietnam War veteran died of cancer. Because of the veterans who escorted his casket to his grave at Riverside, she said she has a proud memory of an awful day.

The aging honor guard didn’t step smartly in line as they surrounded the casket. Their hands shook as they fumbled to fold the flag. And the veteran who handed the memento to the mourning mother read the military’s traditional words of gratitude from a slip of paper he taped to the back of one of his white gloves. It was, he said, a device to aid his failing memory.

But Brown didn’t notice the tremors and the flaws.

“I felt so proud when I was handed that flag,” she said. “It hurt and all that, but I just thought, my son was deserving of this, and I was honored by getting his flag.”

Like other mourning families, Jones found a volunteer honor guard through the mortuary. Others find them through cemeteries and veterans’ groups.

The military still regularly honors high-ranking officers at their funerals, regardless of the costs. But it is exploring alternatives to drawing more honor guards from its ranks, including using reserve forces and enlisting more veterans to do the job for free.

Last August, the U.S. Air Force began a pilot program to bolster its limited honor guard detail at Edwards Air Force Base with Air Force Reserves and the National Guard.

The Marine Corps still trains honor guards composed of active personnel who volunteer for the duty. Since December 1997, when complaints about the lack of burial honors reached Washington, Marine base commanders have been under orders to meet every request for an honor guard.

But Capt. Sean Gibson, a Marine spokesman, acknowledged that not every request for honors is met. “Clearly, we’re trying to support the requirement, but it is getting harder and harder,” he said.

The idea of honoring veterans at their deaths dates to the Civil War, when the nation was shocked by the slaughter of tens of thousands of soldiers. From the beginning, it was veterans who took the lead in upholding that tradition.

In 1862, the first 14 national cemeteries were established, and that same year an Army of the Republic general composed taps.

By 1891, the bugle call was being played at funerals of servicemen and veterans around the country, and the use of pallbearers, flag-draped caskets and gun salutes were widespread.

“It was part of the development of the whole idea of the veteran as someone to be venerated,” said James McPherson, a professor of history at Princeton University and one of the nation’s leading Civil War scholars.

“The Civil War was an experience that consumed the whole society, and I think there was a sense that [veterans’] sacrifices would and should be honored,” he said.

In 1933, Gen. Douglas MacArthur signed a directive ordering an eight-member honor guard and a bugler at all veterans’ funerals, except when distance or time of war made it impossible. That directive remained in force throughout World War II.

In the years after the war, the tradition of honoring dead veterans was formalized by the military.

And as recently as the 1980s, at the country’s 115 national cemeteries operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, the presence of soldiers trained in the crisply executed basics of military honors was commonplace.

Reliance on Volunteers

In states such as California, dotted with military installations, an honor guard detail of active duty personnel was always on call.

“It was a promise sometimes made by enlistment personnel. I heard mine at orientation,” said Floyd Pedersen, 84, a World War II veteran from Westminster. Although he has glaucoma in his left eye and walks with a cane, he still volunteers one day a month at Riverside.

“I know it was said because I always remembered it, and so did a lot of other people. I tell you, I know my time is coming. And if they don’t do what they said they’d do, I’m gonna haunt them. I really am,” Pedersen said.

But the veterans can’t manage by themselves.

Increasingly, they are relying for help on those who are not elderly and never served in the military. At Riverside, for example, ROTC teams from high schools in Orange, Los Angeles and Riverside counties serve as honor guards five days a month.

Other youths volunteer on their own. Ryan Colvin, 17, of San Jacinto, an aspiring trumpet player, was looking for little more than a performance venue when he answered an ad in a Riverside paper placed by veterans seeking volunteers.

“I kind of did it just to play around on the trumpet,” Colvin said. But “when I heard about the percentage that don’t get buried [with honors] and I heard about what they did and everything, I got to thinking, it’s kind of sad that they just forget about them when they die.”

The veteran guards have also drawn active duty personnel who volunteer to honor those who served before them.

“A lot of them that we’re burying now gave up their youth to serve this country, and they deserve every bit of honor that can be given them,” said Ted Woodward-Partridge, 32, a Navy operating room technician at Camp Pendleton. He takes off one day a month to volunteer with an honor guard detail whose other members are in their 70s.

One recent day, Woodward-Partridge and other volunteers arrived early at Riverside. It was a slow day, only five funerals, and the veterans piled into their cars for the drive from one service to another.

They used walkie-talkies to communicate with a volunteer dispatcher who told them the location of each funeral in the sprawling 700-acre cemetery. They kept an extra U.S. flag in a car trunk, in case a mortuary forgot to bring one.

They marched, slightly off step, alongside the casket, and snapped, slightly raggedly, to attention at the sound of the bugle.

“I know it sounds ghoulish . . . but it’s something they’re proud to do,” said Dutch Dettinger, 69, of Sun City, Calif., a World War II veteran who founded the honor guard program at Riverside. “Many of our team, we’ve turned around and buried them in the last few months. They know it’s gonna be them soon. But still they come limping out here . . . to render honors.”

* HEROIC EFFORTS

Web site chronicles the World War II battle exploits of dozens of U.S. paratroopers. B1