Up To 64,000 Arlington Graves Misidentified Or Misplaced
Dec 22, 2011 Comments Off Pat Dollard
After a year-long effort to account for every single grave at Arlington National Cemetery, Army officials said Thursday that there might be problems, some as minor as errors in paper records, with nearly 65,000 sites–or one-quarter of all graves at the nation’s most prominent military burial ground.
In a highly anticipated report, mandated by Congress last year in the wake of the burial scandal at Arlington, the cemetery cited monumental challenges in completing the task–Civil War-era logs gone missing, illegible headstones and burial procedures that changed signifiantly over time at the 150-year-old cemetery.
“In a lot of cases the marker is absolutely right,” said Army Col. John Scharder, the co-chair of the task force. “The service was conducted flawlessly and someone wrote something on a piece of paper wrong.”
But “the discovery of burial errors cannot be ruled out,” the report said.
Congress ordered the accounting after an Army investigation found widespread problems including mismarked or unmarked graves, urns that had been dug up and dumped in a dirt pile, and millions of dollars wasted on contracts that produced nothing.
Since then additional problems have been discovered, prompting a criminal investigation by the FBI and the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, including a mass grave that held eight sets of cremated remains.
The revelations of the problems led to the removal of the cemetery’s leadership. A new team, in place since June, 2010, has since embarked on an ambitious–and exceedingly difficult–project to document every single grave.
An accountability task force has photographed every burial marker and uploaded the information to a database where it was double-checked against more than 500,000 paper records that have been scanned into the system.
So far, the task force has found no problems with 195,748 sites, according to the report. Of the remaining 64,230 sites, there have been some discrepancies that warrant further review. Arlington officials stressed that those problems could be minor, such as typos in names or dates of death that don’t mean that people are buried in the wrong places.
Schrader said that it could be another six months before the cemetery will be able to get through those cases.
